Beamforming Evaluation of 5G User Equipment through Novel Key Performance Indicators

Abstract

Several standards exist for testing the radiated “over the air” (OTA) performance of 5G User Equipment (UE) devices. All these standards are limited to a Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) evaluation of the 5G device. With 5G networks and devices already deployed and in operation, it becomes necessary to develop realistic Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) and beamforming performance metrics for 5G UEs. Since the most important feature of 5G is beamforming, this paper reviews the main challenges to realistically evaluate 5G device performance and proposes several novel key performance indicators (KPIs). The results obtained by some measurements show that it is possible to derive figures of merit that address the complexity of beamforming and MIMO-based 5G performance of devices in a much better way compared with the existing SISO KPIs, and that academia should provide advanced future research on these more realistic KPIs for the industry to face the challenges ahead with a better analysis of the problem in hand.