The Primary Synchronization Signal of 5G NR

Initial access is the process that a user equipment (UE) establishes initial connection to the cellular network, and the first step is to detect the presence of primary synchronization signal (PSS) and secondary synchronization signal (SSS) to conduct cell-search and downlink synchronization. This paper focus on the PSS waveform of 5G New Radio (NR). We present two waveforms suitable for NR-PSS: m sequence and Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequence, then discuss their properties of autocorrelation and cross-correlation when adopted for NR-PSS. In addition, we discuss their feasibility since frequency allocation for 5G NR includes millimeterwave (mmWave) bands that may bring large frequency offset. On the basis of matched-filter detection with hypothesis, we further evaluate the frequency offset estimation performance of these two sequence.