Cross-link interference in the 5G cell search procedure: Observation and field experiments for mitigation

This paper presents field experiment results that illustrate the impact of cross-link interference on the cell search procedure in a 5G time division duplex system. We initially show how cross-link interference affects to the cell search procedure from an analytic aspect. An example of an experimental result provided in this paper shows how the user equipment wrongly estimates the symbol timing offset due to cross-link interference. Furthermore, we propose a modified cell search algorithm which is robust against the strong influence of cross-link interference. The proposed modification efficiently suppresses the effects of cross-link interference by applying selective energy normalization to the correlation process. The experimental results show that the modified algorithm can accurately estimate the symbol timing offset with a negligible increment in computation time.