Course abstract

Air Interface is one of the most important elements that differentiate between 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G. While 3G was CDMA based, 4G was OFDMA based; this course reveals the contents of air interface for 5G. While 4G brought in a deluge of infotainment services, 5G aims to provide extremely low delay services, great service in crowd, enhanced mobile broadband (virtual reality being made real), ultra reliable and secure connectivity, ubiquitous QoS, and highly energy efficient networks.The above mentioned requirements are expected to be met by several advancement in technologies such as (i) new waveforms (termed as 5G NR, the new radio), (ii) millimeter wave technology, (iii) massive multiple antenna technologies (iv) non orthogonal multiple access (v) heterogeneous networks such as small cells and device to device communications (vi) energy savings in radio access network and (vii) ubiquitous quality of service among others.In this course we aim to provide insight into the fundamentals of the above mentioned methods, which are essential components of 5G Air Interface.We will begin with an overview of 5G technology aspects. Then we will discuss 5G new radio waveform, its genesis and variants. Thereafter we will introduce non orthogonal multiple access scheme. Next we will discuss various aspects of mmwave communication technology. Massive MIMO will be presented next, wherein we will discuss the essential building blocks and design challenges. While all these will be discussed that propagation models which are essential for performance analysis will also be briefly presented. This will be followed by performance analysis of heterogeneous networks including small cells and device to device communication.