1598 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO.

9, SEPTEMBER 2019

5G Measurement Adaptation Based on Channel Hardening Occurrence

Victor Farias Monteiro , Icaro L. da Silva, and Fco Rodrigo P. Cavalcanti

Abstract— In 5G, reference signals may be transmitted on

beams. Thus, the amount of UE measurements might increase
with the number of beams, increasing battery consumption.
With narrow beams, under specific conditions, channel variations
may decrease, the so-called Channel Hardening (CH) effect.
So, the UE might obtain highly correlated measurements, which
suggests that the measurements could be reduced without major
drawbacks. This letter proposes a method for CH detection and
measurement adaptation. Moreover, an overview of CH and 5G
reference signals, i.e., SSB and CSI-RS, is presented. Simulations
show that our proposal can reduce measurements in up to 8x.
Index Terms— Channel hardening, measurement, CSI-RS,
SSB.

I. I NTRODUCTION

I N DECEMBER 2017 and June 2018, the 3rd Generation

Partnership Project (3GPP) released the non-standalone and
the standalone 5G New Radio (NR) specifications, respec-
tively. These are the first sets of 5G standards, known as
3GPP specification serie 38 Release 15. Some of the key NR
features are the support to high frequency bands, deployment
of massive antenna arrays and multi-beam operation.
To support multi-beam operation, NR introduced the con-
cept of Synchronization Signal Blocks (SSBs) and broad-
ened the use of Channel State Information Reference Signals
(CSI-RSs). These signals may be directionally transmitted on
beams. Thus, the amount of User Equipment (UE) measure-
ments might increase with the number of beams, increasing
battery consumption. In order to overcome this issue, one
might consider that channel variations due to fast fading may
decrease when narrow beams are deployed.
The fact that the channel fluctuations might decrease due
to the use of narrow beams and the deployment of large
antenna arrays is not new, this is the so-called called Channel
Hardening (CH) effect [1]. Works from the 60s had already
confirmed this. For example, the author of [2] experimentally
noticed that the number of times the fading signal crossed
an arbitrarily chosen level, below the average signal strength,
decreased significantly when considering narrower beamwidth.
As illustrated in FIG 1a, the channel fluctuations are due
to the different delay taps coming from different reflectors.
Manuscript received May 28, 2019; accepted June 21, 2019. Date of
publication July 2, 2019; date of current version September 10, 2019.
This work was supported by Ericsson Research, Sweden, and Ericsson
Innovation Center, Brazil, under UFC.43 Technical Cooperation Contract
Ericsson/UFC. Victor F. Monteiro was also supported by CAPES under grant
88881.132080/2016-01. The associate editor coordinating the review of this
letter and approving it for publication was F. Wang. (Corresponding author:
Victor Farias Monteiro.)
V. F. Monteiro and F. R. P. Cavalcanti are with the Wireless Telecommunica-
tions Research Group (GTEL), Federal University of Ceará (UFC), Fortaleza
60.020-181, Brazil (e-mail: victor@gtel.ufc.br; rodrigo@gtel.ufc.br).
I. L. da Silva is with the Ericsson Research, 164-40 Kista, Sweden (e-mail:
icaro.leonardo.da.silva@ericsson.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2019.2926268
1558-2558 © 2019 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Fig. 1. Possible causes of channel fluctuations reduction.
Transmitter and receiver are surrounded by objects which
reflect and scatter the energy, causing several waves to arrive
at the receiver via different routes [3]. The multipath compo-
nents usually have different phase and amplitude leading to
frequency selective fading and time dispersion.
In the frequency domain, the coherence bandwidth of a
channel measures the range of frequencies over which all
spectral components have approximately equal gain and linear
phase, i.e., the range of frequencies over which the channel can
be considered “flat”. In the time domain, the RMS delay spread
is used as an indicator of dispersion. It takes into account the
relative power of the different taps as well as their delays.
When deploying narrow beams, as in Fig 1a, part of the
scatters are not illuminated, thus the channel delay spread
might be reduced and the overall channel response might look
flat. Narrow beams might act as a spatial filter on different
delay taps, leading to high channel correlation, and reducing
the degree of channel non-stationairty [4].
From another perspective, instead of considering narrow
beams, the authors of [5] combined the signal transmitted
by antenna elements from a large antenna array. It was one
of the first works to use the term CH. They concluded that,
combining many random channel realizations reduces the total
channel variation. Fig. 1b illustrates this concept. The left
hand side presents a transmitter with M antennas, while the
right hand side presents the evolution in time of the hi links.
Suppose that the links are independent and that the probability

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MONTEIRO et al.: 5G MEASUREMENT ADAPTATION BASED ON CH OCCURRENCE
of one of them is facing a deep fading is P , then the probability
of all of them is fluctuating is P M . Thus, when the number of
antennas grows, this probability becomes smaller. The red
dashed line in the right hand side of Fig. 1b presents the
envelope link. In this example, there is always at least one
link in good conditions, so the envelope fluctuates less than
the links themselves.
Based on real measurements, the authors of [6] also con-
cluded that the composite channel formed by a massive
antenna array tends to follow the average of the single antenna
case, smoothing out the fast fading. Larger variations started
to occur over the course of seconds rather than milliseconds.
They also noticed improvements in robustness and latency due
to the mitigation of fast-fade error bursts.
Important to highlight that the CH depends on the character-
istics of the channel. According to [7], under uncorrelated fad-
ing, 100 antennas is typically sufficient to benefit from almost
perfect CH. The authors of [7] also concluded that under
spatially correlated fading, it is still possible to achieve CH,
however the number of required antennas increases compared
to the previous case.
The majority of the works in the literature studies CH
from the point of view of information theory, exploring the
consequences in the channel capacity. This letter presents a
different approach. We explore CH aiming at reducing beam
measurements supporting beam-based procedures, e.g., beam
management, handover, dual connectivity or carrier aggrega-
tion setup, etc. More specifically, this letter proposes a method
to identify when CH is occurring and also a measurement
adaptation method based on CH occurrence, useful for UE
power savings. Before addressing these topics, next section
presents in more details NR synchronization and reference
signals used for mobility management.
II. 5G S YNCHRONIZATION AND R EFERENCE S IGNALS
As in LTE, in NR, the CSI-RSs are used for Channel
State Information (CSI) acquisition, which is important for
scheduling and link adaptation. Besides, in NR, their use
has been broadened and, as the SSBs, they are also used
for Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) measurements,
which is important for mobility management.
One of the main differences between SSBs and CSI-RSs is
the way how the UE can measure them. The SSBs are blindly
decoded, which means that even in idle mode the UEs can
detect and decode them. However, in order to decode the CSI-
RSs, the UEs must be already connected, since they need to
be configured in advance by the Base Stations (BSs). Among
other configurations, the BSs need to inform the UEs in which
part of the spectrum they should perform the measurements
and which CSI-RSs they should monitor [8].
Another difference between CSI-RS and SSB is that the first
one can be UE specifically configured, while the second one is
used for general broadcast. Thus, one possible deployment is
to transmit SSBs with wide beams and CSI-RSs with narrow
ones. On one hand, wide SSBs make the system more robust to
blockage, since they can propagate signals in more directions.
On the other hand, narrow CSI-RSs provide better Signal to
Noise Ratio (SNR). The negative side is that the range at
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Fig. 2. Time-frequency structure of a SSB.
which a UE could send and receive data (based on CSI-RS
measurements) will be longer than the range where a cell can
be detected (based on SSB measurements).
Regarding the SSBs, as illustrated in Fig. 2, it is a group
of 4 Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)
symbols along 240 subcarriers [9]. It consists of Primary Syn-
chronization Signal (PSS), Secondary Synchronization Signal
(SSS) and Physical Broadcast Channel (PBCH).
As in LTE, in NR there are 3 possible values for PSS. The
UE applies a time domain matched filtering to search for one
of them. After finding it, the UE knows the timing of the
SSB and can also find the SSS. The SSS can assume 336
different values, twice more options than in LTE. Together,
PSS and SSS indicate the physical cell ID, which can then
assume 3 × 336 = 1008 different values [9].
When operating with beams, the BSs transmit SSBs in
bursts. Beams from the same cell have the same PSS and SSS.
The main difference between them is the content of PBCH,
which tells the beam index and is usually associated with a
given transmission direction, as illustrated in the bottom part
of Fig. 2. The number of SSBs that can be broadcast in a
burst depends on the frequency range. Frequency ranges up
to 3 GHz may have a maximum of 4 SSBs in a burst, while
for 3 GHz-6 GHz the maximum is 8 and for millimeter Waves
(mmWs) is 64 [10]. Furthermore, the time duration of the burst
must be lower than or equal to 5 ms.
When accessing the network for the first time, the UEs
should assume a SSB periodicity of 20 ms. Other values for
the SSB burst periodicity are defined in [8], which are: 5 ms,
10 ms, 40 ms, 80 ms and 160 ms.
III. C HANNEL H ARDENING I DENTIFICATION AND
M EASUREMENT A DAPTATION
Since CH is characterized by the decreasing in channel
fluctuations, in order to detect if it is happening or not in
the time domain, we propose that the UEs use a sliding
window to log the last X measurements of a given quantity,
e.g., RSRP, and calculate the Standard Deviation (STD) of
these measurements. It is expected a low STD when CH
happens.
Based on the calculated STD, the UE can estimate the level
of CH and execute a couple of actions. A simple example
is shown in Table I. In this case, the physical layer (L1)
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TABLE I
E XAMPLE OF A CTIONS BASED ON THE RSRP STD
Fig. 3. In the presence of CH the channel (green curves) fluctuates less, thus
the STD (red curves) decreases. So, it is not necessary to perform so frequent
measurements.
Fig. 4. Signaling procedure for the proposed scheme.
measurement period value is being set according to the calcu-
lated RSRP STD.
Fig. 3 illustrates our proposal. Two situations are presented:
with and without CH. The green curves are signal strengths.
The red curves represent the STD related to these signals. The
vertical blue lines show the time instants in which the UE
would perform a measurement. In this example, if the STD is
lower than a given threshold (black dashed line) for at least a
few instants of time (equivalent to the Time-To-Trigger (TTT)
in a handover procedure), thus the UE is allowed to change
the measurement frequency from often to seldom.
Regarding practical aspects of implementation, Fig. 4
presents the signaling involved in the proposed scheme. In NR,
the network sends Radio Resource Control (RRC) messages to
UEs in order to configure functions related to user and control
planes. This configuration typically informs if the reporting
shall be periodic and/or event triggered, besides of informing
what the UEs shall measure, e.g., cell/beam RSRP. One way to
implement the proposed method is to incorporate the necessary
settings in the RRC measurement configuration, as depicted
in Fig. 4. After being configured, the UE will periodically
perform RSRP measurements and evaluate the RSRP STD.
When the RSRP STD changes of group (Table I.), the UE
reports this information to its serving BS. If necessary, the BS
will then send a new RRC measurement configuration.
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IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2019
TABLE II
S IMULATION PARAMETERS
The STD depends on the window size. In a large window,
a new measurement will have a low impact on the STD. In this
case, a high measurement period could hinder reacting fast
to sudden drops in the signal quality, since it would take
longer time until we have enough measurements to produce an
important change in the STD. To overcome this, we could also
decrease the window size when increasing the measurement
period. A shorter window size would counterbalance the
higher measurement period and fewer measurements would
be necessary to detect when the signal fluctuations increase,
allowing the UE to react faster to this change.
Next section evaluates the proposed method.
IV. N UMERICAL E VALUATION : C ASE S TUDY W ITH 5G NR
A. Simulation Assumptions
The system parameters were aligned with NR 3GPP speci-
fication serie 38 Release 15. We considered 7 hexagonal sites
with 3 sectors each and Inter-Site Distance (ISD) of 200 m.
The UEs were dropped in the sites following a uniform
distribution (10 UEs per site). When not explicitly defined,
the UEs’s speed was 0.1 m s−1 . The analyses presented in the
following consider the results of 35 simulations.
The maximum BS Tx power was 49dBm. Besides,
we adopted a system bandwidth of 40 MHz and carrier fre-
quency of 28 GHz. The system was composed of 25 Resource
Blocks (RBs), each consisting of 12 adjacent subcarries spaced
of 120 kHz. The value of the considered Transmission Time
Interval (TTI) was 0.125 ms. Table II presents an list of the
adopted simulation parameters.
Concerning the channel model, it was adopted the 3GPP
3D urban macro described in [11]. It is a 3D geometry-
based stochastic model that reproduces propagation effects of
Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) channels, such as,
distance-dependent path-loss, small-scale fading and shadow-
ing. Furthermore, it considers a multipath propagation taking
into account LOS/NLOS state probabilities. The 3GPP channel
model is spatially correlated with continuous evolution in time
(time variant channel).
Regarding the adopted measurement model, it was also
aligned with NR 3GPP standards. According to this model,
MONTEIRO et al.: 5G MEASUREMENT ADAPTATION BASED ON CH OCCURRENCE
Fig. 5. Analysis of channel fluctuations in time and frequency domains.
in order to derive the cell quality, the UEs measure multiple
beams of a cell and averages the N best beams above a given
threshold with respect to the best beam. It was considered a
sliding window of 640 ms.
B. Analysis 1: CH in SSBs and CSI-RSs Measurements
As presented in Section I, the channel may become flat in
both time and frequency domains. Thus, before evaluating the
proposed method, we analyze in Fig. 5 the fluctuations in both
domains. More specifically, we evaluated the impact of the
number of SSBs on the fluctuations of RSRP over the time,
5a. Besides, we evaluated the impact of the number of CSI-
RSs on the fluctuations of Channel Quality Indicator (CQI)
measurements along the subbands, 5b. In this letter, the higher
the number of beams is, the narrower they are.
Regarding the RSRP measurements, it was considered an
L1 measurement periodicity equal to 20 ms and it was ana-
lyzed the STD of the samples inside of a sliding window of
640 ms. Fig. 5a presents the Cumulative Distribution Function
(CDF) of the calculated STD. Notice that the 64 SSBs case
presents lower values of STD. For example, the percentage
of STD samples with value lower than or equal to 0.3dBm
increases from 15% to 34%, when increasing the number of
SSBs from 4 to 64. This is due to the CH.
Concerning the CQI measurements along the frequency
domain, for each time instant, it was estimated the power
gain of these measurements. Fig. 5b presents the STD for
3 different number of CSI-RSs, i.e., beams. The higher the
number of beams is, the lower the STD is.
According to 3GPP specification [12], the UE reports a
wideband CQI and a 2-bit subband differential CQI for a
subset of subbands. CH occurrence in the frequency domain
could be exploited to reduce the size of CQI reports. Since,
in the presence of CH, subbands might have similar values of
CQI, the UE could report the CQI of a smaller set of subbands
and inform the BS that CH is happening. Thus, the report
size could be reduced without loss of information. Moreover,
Radio Resource Allocation (RRA) algorithms could also be
simplified due to the reduced frequency selectivity.
Regarding the CH feasibility, it is important to highlight
that CH appears after coherent precoding has been applied
and the UE is aligned with a beam direction. Since CSI-RSs
can be UE specifically configured, it is possible to do this
for each UE. However, SSBs are used for general broadcast.
This is the reason why in Fig. 5 we have lower levels of CH
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1601
Fig. 6. Difference between RSRP measured with default periodicity,
i.e., 20 ms, and higher periodicities.
Fig. 7. Impact of mobility.
in the measurements based on SSB transmission, compared to
the ones based on CSI-RS transmission.
C. Analysis 2: Measurement Periodicity Adaptation
In order to validate the proposed method, the RSRP mea-
surements were sampled with 3 different measurement period-
icities, i.e., 20 ms (baseline), 80 ms and 160 ms. The samples
obtained with higher measurement periodicity, i.e., 80 ms and
160 ms, were interpolated and we analyzed the difference
between them and the samples obtained in the baseline case.
Fig. 6 presents the CDF curves of these differences. The
samples were split in 3 groups according to the STD thresholds
defined in Table I.
Considering 0.6 dB as the maximum acceptable difference,
which in linear scale corresponds to a difference of 15%,
in Fig. 6a, we can see that 80 ms can be used as a measurement
periodicity for groups 01 and 02 (STD lower than 0.8dBm).
Analogously, in Fig. 6b, we see that 160 ms should only be
used as measurement periodicity for group 01 (STD lower
than 0.3dBm), since for the other groups the difference to the
baseline periodicity, i.e., 20 ms, can be higher than 0.6 dB.
Also, notice in Fig. 6 that the proposed method is valid
not only for a high number of SSBs, e.g., 64, but also for
the case with low number of SSBs, e.g., 4. As shown in
FIG. 5a, the scenario with 4 SSBs also presents cases with
low RSRP STD, even if they are fewer than in the scenario
with more SSBs.
One could wonder if reducing measurements would affect
accuracy of some parameter analysis. The answer is no,
since low values of RSRP difference, in Fig. 6, means that
1602
Fig. 8. Difference between RSRP measured with default periodicity, i.e., 20 ms, and higher periodicities considering 4 different UE’s speeds.
measurement periodicity of 20 ms can be obtained through
interpolation of a signal sampled with higher periodicity.
D. Analysis 3: Mobility Impact
The impact of UE mobility on the proposed method was
also evaluated. For this purpose, 4 different values of UE’s
speed were considered: 0.1 m/s, 1.4 m/s, 5 m/s and 10 m/s.
As in Fig. 5a, Fig. 7 presents the CDF of the STD for
the cases with 4 and 64 SSBs. According to this figure,
increasing the UE speed increases the channel fluctuations
in both cases, i.e., 4 and 64 SSBs. Besides, remark that the
mobility has a worse impact in the case with narrow beams,
i.e., 64 SSBs. This is due to the fact that spatial focusing of
energy provided by a narrow beam translates to a larger spatial
decorrelation [6]. Thus, in a scenario with narrow beams, when
moving, a UE will pass through more decorrelated beams. This
result highlights the importance of beam tracking techniques
to quickly update the best beam direction to serve a UE.
Although the number of UEs subjected to channel hardening
decreases when the UE speed increases, the method proposed
in Section III still works as shown in Fig. 8. As in Fig. 6, Fig. 8
presents the CDF of the difference between RSRP samples
with baseline measurement periodicity, i.e., 20 ms, and higher
measurement periodicity.
In group 01, Fig. 8a, even for higher speeds, both measure-
ment periodicities presented differences lower than 0.6 dB,
i.e., 15% in linear scale, in at least 90% of the cases. In
group 2, Fig. 8b, measurement periodicity equal to 80 ms
still presented differences lower than 0.6 dB in more than
90% of the cases. These results show that, as proposed
in Table I., measurement periodicity equal to 160 ms can
be used for group 01, even when the UEs are moving and
that measurement periodicity equal to 80 ms can be used for
groups 01 and 02.
V. C ONCLUSIONS
The present letter addressed the problem of measurement
adaptation in 5G systems. It was confirmed that, when deploy-
ing narrow beams, the channel fluctuations reduce, which is
called CH effect.
The numerical results validated the proposed method for
CH detection and measurement adaptation, where the CH
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IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2019
is detected based on the STD of RSRP measurements in a
sliding window and the measurement periodicity is dynam-
ically adjusted according to the level of CH. In the ana-
lyzed scenario, in some cases, the measurement periodicity
was increased from 20 ms to 160 ms, which means 8x less
measurements.
Regarding the CH feasibility, it was concluded that lower
levels of CH should be expected in channels used for SSB
transmission, compared to the ones used for CSI-RS, since
the last ones can be UE specifically configured. Besides,
as presented, mobility is expected to negatively impact
the CH, since the precoder coefficients must be updated
more often in order to keep the alignment between beam
and UE.
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