Preamble Design and System Acquisition in Ultra Mobile Broadband Communication Systems

The wide choices of deployment parameters in next generation wireless communication systems, such as flexible bandwidth allocation, synchronous/asynchronous modes, FDD/TDD, full/half duplex, and configurable cyclic prefix duration, etc., present significant challenges in preamble and system acquisition design. This paper addresses these challenges, as well as the solutions provided by the 3GPP2 Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) standard. The proposed preamble design facilitates the maximal flexibility of the system configuration and yet has low overhead, low acquisition latency, and low complexity. Although the design is discussed under the UMB context, it also serves as a preamble design paradigm for an OFDMA communication system in general.