This whitepaper highlights the primary elements crucial to the development and deployment of 5G mmWave mobile communications. One of the main attractions of mmWave is its large bandwidth, allowing operators to meet the growing demand for high speed data for typical deployment scenarios, cities, stadiums, malls, enterprise campuses or factories, and other places where data congestion is a problem. Other benefits of mmWave include ultra-reliable low-latency applications and backhaul to cell sites.
While most 5G networks have so far been deployed in a variety of spectrum bands, including below 1 GHz and between 1 and 6 GHz, 5G New Radio (NR) is the first mobile technology generation to make use of the mmWave spectrum. This spectrum is generally best suited for short range transmissions and can provide a variety of benefits, from coverage extension at the edge of the network, to capacity enhancement, to backhaul.
This 5G Americas white paper covers the following topics, with lead authors from Intel Corporation, Qualcomm, and T-Mobile:
- Status update of mmWave spectrum globally and in the US
- Regulatory underpinnings of mmWave spectrum on 5G
- A detailed analysis of the mmWave channel
- Several use cases for mmWave
- Discussion of the technologies that allow mmWave to work
- Operational aspects of mmWave
- mmWave link budget and its performance characteristics.
