5G New Radio: Waveform, Frame Structure, Multiple Access, and Initial Access

Different from conventional mobile networks designed to optimize the transmission efficiency of one particular service (e.g., streaming voice/video) primarily, the industry and academia are reaching an agreement that 5G mobile networks are projected to sustain manifold wireless requirements, including higher mobility, higher data rates, and lower latency. For this purpose, 3GPP has launched the standardization activity for the first phase 5G system in Release 15 named New Radio (NR). To fully understand this crucial technology, this article offers a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art development of NR, including deployment scenarios, numerologies, frame structure, new waveform, multiple access, initial/random access procedure, and enhanced carrier aggregation (CA) for resource requests and data transmissions. The provided insights thus facilitate knowledge of design and practice for further features of NR.