Multi-slot Transmission with Effective Frequency Hopping and DMRS Bundling for 5G NR Coverage Enhancement

The paper proposes an effective method of data transmission over New Radio (NR) Uplink (UL) channel to improve coverage of 5G wireless communication systems. This method is based on the dedicated time-frequency allocation pattern that makes it possible to combine inter-slot frequency hopping (FH) and demodulation reference signals (DMRS) bundling for joint channel estimation in a newly developed method of multi-slot data transmission over UL channel of 5G NR networks. The proposed approach demonstrates the improvement of coverage by utilizing the benefit of both mentioned coverage enhancement techniques and, therefore, may be recommended for application in future 5G communication networks. The performance improvement, when using the proposed algorithm, was tested using the link level simulator of the communication system based on the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard for 5G NR mobile networks.