A Novel Network Resolved and Mobile Assisted Cell Search Method for 5G Cellular Communication Systems

Abstract

When the user equipment (UE) is turned on, it first needs to perform an initial cell search procedure before it can communicate with the base station (BS). However, this procedure must deal with the initial time and frequency synchronization and search for the appropriate home BS for services. In conventional cell search methods, the entire cell search process is carried out on the UE, where the computational requirement can lead to additional overhead and power consumption of the UE. Therefore, aiming to help UEs offloading their overhead to BSs, we in this paper propose a novel cell search method, called <i>Network Resolved and Mobile Assisted Cell Search</i>, which can achieve our goal by letting the BSs be the main performers for deciding the appropriate BSs for connection and letting UEs only be the assistants of the cell search process. The implementation details and analysis of the proposed cell search approach are provided along with the numerical simulations. Results show that our proposed cell search not only can offload the computational overhead, but it also outperforms the conventional code-based cell search approach in terms of the cell search error probability with similar overall network energy consumption.