Error Rate Performance Analysis of the 5G New Radio Physical Uplink Control Channel

Abstract

Different use cases of the 5G New Radio (NR) technology imply the emergence of channel impairments which affect the signals transmitted in uplink and downlink physical channels. Such impairments are various combinations of fading channel features which lead to inevitable degradation of link performance. In this paper, the impact of such impairments on the error rate performance of the 5G NR Physical Uplink Control Channel (PUCCH) is analyzed. In the 5G NR systems, PUCCH is adopted to transmit Uplink Control Information (UCI), which, depending on the PUCCH format, may contain Scheduling Requests (SR), Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) acknowledgements, and Channel State Information (CSI) reports. Using sets with different parameters values in the carrier and PUCCH configuration, we simulate the entire transmission path through a tapped delay line (TDL) fading channel and the Block Error Rate (BLER) calculation for the PUCCH Format 3. The goal of such simulation is to identify the key carrier and PUCCH Format 3 configuration parameters that affect the error rate performance of this control channel.