Measurement Challenges for 5G and Beyond: An Update from the National Institute of Standards and Technology

In less than a decade since the mainstreaming of cellular wireless technology, spectrum has become saturated by data-intensive smartphones, driving the so-called spectrum crunch. As a solution, the wireless community is pursuing the use of alternatives to current wireless technologies, including multiple-input/multipleoutput (MIMO) antenna arrays that allow increased simultaneous transmission capacity; the millimeter-wave (mmW) spectrum (30-300 GHz) to alleviate the spectrum crunch in current frequency bands; and ultradense networks transmitting wide-band modulated signals to allow short-range, high-speed data transfer.