Mitigating LTE Downlink Degradation from NR SRS Antenna Switching
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Solution Overview
Problem
The coexistence of New Radio (NR) sounding reference signals and Long-Term Evolution (LTE) communications poses a challenge due to antenna switching, which leads to downlink performance degradation in LTE communications.
Innovation Solution
A method is implemented where a user equipment (UE) identifies symbols and antennas impacted by antenna switching for NR uplink reference signals and performs mitigation actions such as blanking samples, modifying channel estimates, refraining from noise estimation, or generating channel estimates without using impacted symbols.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If antenna switching is performed to transmit NR uplink reference signals, then NR uplink transmission capability is improved, but LTE downlink performance deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The UE identifies symbols that will be impacted by antenna switching in advance, before the actual switching occurs. This allows the UE to proactively apply mitigation actions (such as blanking or excluding these symbols from channel estimation) to prevent LTE downlink performance degradation before it happens, while still allowing the antenna switching to proceed for NR uplink reference signal transmission
2Productivity
If antenna switching is performed for NR SRS transmission, then spectral efficiency of NR is improved, but channel estimation accuracy for LTE deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts or removes the problematic symbols from the channel estimation process. By identifying symbols that are impacted by antenna switching and excluding them from LTE downlink channel estimation, the patent ensures that channel estimation accuracy is maintained using only the clean, unaffected symbols, while still allowing the antenna switching to occur for NR SRS transmission
Data Source
AI summary
Various aspects of the present disclosure generally relate to wireless communication. In some aspects, a user equipment (UE) may identify one or more symbols, associated with downlink communication of a first radio access technology (RAT), that are Impacted by antenna switching used to transmit an uplink reference signal of a second RAT. The UE may perform a mitigation action to mitigate downlink performance degradation associated with the first RAT based at least in part on identifying the one or more symbols. Numerous other aspects are described.