Impact of Bandwidth Part (BWP) Switching on 5G NR System Performance

Bandwidth Parts (BWPs) is a 5G NR feature introduced in 3GPP Release 15 for dynamically adapting the carrier bandwidth and numerology in which a UE operates. BWP allows supporting multiple services per carrier, e.g. eMBB and mMTC. Although BWP enables higher spectrum flexibility and power savings, the effect of delays such as BWP Inactivity Timer and BWP Switch Delay has not been thoroughly studied and understood. This paper presents a system-level evaluation of a 5G NR deployment with dynamic BWP adaptation. As expected, results indicate no impact on performance under higher load; on the other hand, for low load and bursty traffic, BWP switching is more frequent, enabling the potential for power savings at the cost of increased latency and decreased throughput.