Efficient Protocol to Optimize New Radio Frequency Scanning in 5G Network

5G cellular system (also referred to as New Radio (NR)) is getting deployed around the world in two modes popularly known as a Non-Standalone (NSA) mode with 4G and a Standalone mode (SA). The acquisition of a 5G cell is entirely different in NSA mode and SA mode. In NSA mode, the network provides the frequency and Physical Cell Identifier (PCI) values to a User Equipment (UE) through signaling messages for acquiring 5G cells. While in SA mode, the UE performs frequency scanning within different supported bands to search the synchronization signal blocks (SSB) for 5G cell acquisition. In a wireless system, the frequency scan time during cell selection on a Radio Access Technology (RAT) is a crucial performance indicator. In 5G, there are two types of Frequency Ranges (FR): range 1 (FR1 or sub6GHz) and range 2 (FR2 or mmWave), and these ranges are on high-frequency spectrums. So, the width of these bands is large with an increased number of frequencies. As a result, the band scan becomes time-consuming and leads to delayed 5G cell acquisition, further degrading the poor user experiences. Hence reducing 5G frequency scanning time is still an open research problem area for an improved 5G cell selection experience. To solve the above problem, to the best of our knowledge, this paper, for the first time, proposes a new call flow to optimize NR frequency scanning using a federated dynamic list to reduce the scanning time. With the proposed novel idea, the 5G frequency scanning time was reduced by ~95% than the conventional method, depending on the number of entries in the list.