Towards an Appropriate Beamforming Scheme for Initial Cell Discovery in mmW 5G Cellular Networks

Beamforming is an essential requirement to combat high pathloss and to improve signal-to-noise ratio during initial cell discovery in future millimeter wave cellular networks. The choice of an appropriate beamforming is directly coupled with its energy consumption. The energy consumption is even of more concern at a battery limited mobile station (MS). In this work, we provide an energy consumption based comparison of different beamforming schemes while considering both a low power and a high power analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for a millimeter wave based receiver at the MS. We analyze both context information (CI) (GPS positioning based) and non context information based schemes, and show that analog beamforming with CI (where mobile station’s positioning information is already available) can result in a lower energy consumption, while in all other scenarios digital beamforming has a lower energy consumption than analog and hybrid beamforming. We also show that under certain scenarios recently proposed phase shifters network architecture can result in a lower energy consumption than other beamforming schemes. Moreover, we show that the energy consumption trend among different beamforming schemes is valid irrespective of the number of ADC bits. Finally, we propose a new signaling structure which utilizes a relatively higher frequency sub-carrier for primary synchronization signals compared to other signaling, which allows a further reduction in initial cell search delay and energy consumption of the MS.