Demodulation Reference Signal (DM-RS) based channel estimation for non-terrestrial networks to support high mobility

Abstract

This paper provides an adaptive 5G-NR based solution for non-terrestrial networks (NTN) to support the high mobility of the user equipment (UE). A front-loaded demodulation reference signal (DM-RS) symbol pattern with additional orthogonal symbols is proposed to support UE mobility 500 km/h. We develop a 5G-NR link-level simulator (LLS) to analyze the performance of physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) under the proposed front-loaded DM-RS symbol pattern, tapped delay line (TDL) channel model, and precoding-based beamforming/MIMO schemes. The simulation results show that the proposed channel estimation method based on front-loaded DM-RS helps to improve the link reliability and achieves the maximum spectral efficiency up to 5.05 bps/Hz under 64-QAM, which can also contribute to the evolution of NTN in 6G networks to support the transonic speed mobility of UE.