Random access preamble format for systems with many antennas

The computational complexity of FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) processing in an OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) based receiver is large with a large amount of receiver antennas. In LTE (Long Term Evolution) release 8, FFTs of different size are used for user data and random-access preambles [1] requiring additional FFTs to be implemented for random-access reception. Within the current paper, a 5G random-access preamble format is proposed based on a short sequence of the same length as the length of the OFDM symbols that are used for other uplink physical channels, such as user data, control signaling, and reference signals. The preamble sequence is constructed by repeating the short sequence multiple times. A corresponding preamble detector in which FFTs of the same size as for other uplink channels and signals are used is also described. In this way, the amount of special random-access related processing and hardware support is significantly reduced for multi-antenna systems with frequency-domain beamforming. This preamble detector is also robust against inter-carrier interference from other uplink channels and signals. Furthermore, the proposed preamble detector scheme can be used in 5G scenarios with a high amount of phase noise and frequency errors. For time-domain beamforming, the beamforming weights can be changed during preamble reception such that the number of spatial directions is increased for which preamble detection is done. Simulation results are used to compare preamble formats for different lengths of the sequences.