System Level Performance Characteristics of Sub-6GHz Massive MIMO Deployments with the 3GPP New Radio

3GPP has completed the first phase of the standardization of 5G cellular systems covering bands up to 52.6 GHz. The 3GPP Rel-15 New Radio standard provides a comprehensive framework for supporting massive MIMO in a wide variety of use cases and deployment scenarios. The NR-MIMO framework supports large scale antenna arrays having arbitrary configurations and supports digital, hybrid, and analog array architectures for both FDD and TDD deployments. With the rollout of NR soon to commence, many questions have been raised on the benefits and performance of NR-MIMO especially compared to the FD-MIMO framework in Rel-13/14 of LTE. This paper provides detailed system level simula-tion results showing the performance characteristics of NR-MIMO as a function of a various system and deployment parameters such as the array configuration, deployment scenario, and transmission scheme. The purpose is to answer important questions for network planners looking to roll-out NR-MIMO in the near future.