Redefining 5G New Radio Drive Testing
White Papers
5G NR Beam-Based Coverage
Network coverage measurements are different in 5G NR than in Long-Term Evolution (LTE). 5G NR uses various forms of MIMO and beam steering to improve performance, which results in beam-based coverage instead of cell-based coverage.
Massive MIMO is meant for sub-6 GHz applications. It requires many more antennas on the base station, configured for multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO). MU-MIMO systems send multiple data streams using the same time-frequency resources from the base station. Using the massive number of antennas improves MU-MIMO performance, increasing total cell capacity.