Aspects of the present disclosure relate generally to wireless communication systems, and more particularly, to wireless communication systems for indicating and discovering physical cell identifiers.
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, and single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems.
These multiple access technologies have been adopted in various telecommunication standards to provide a common protocol that enables different wireless devices to communicate on a municipal, national, regional, and even global level. For example, a fifth generation (5G) wireless communications technology (which can be referred to as 5G new radio (5G NR)) is envisaged to expand and support diverse usage scenarios and applications with respect to current mobile network generations. In an aspect, 5G communications technology can include: enhanced mobile broadband addressing human-centric use cases for access to multimedia content, services and data; ultra-reliable-low latency communications (URLLC) with certain specifications for latency and reliability; and massive machine type communications, which can allow a very large number of connected devices and transmission of a relatively low volume of non-delay-sensitive information. As the demand for mobile broadband access continues to increase, however, further improvements in 5G communications technology and beyond may be desired.
For example, for 5G communications technology and beyond, current network-centric media access control (MAC) layer technologies may not provide a desired level of resource utilization and/or efficiency because of the various associated signal broadcasts. Further, these broadcasts consume power and may or may not be received or used by some or all of a cell's UEs. Additionally, a wireless communication system having a network-centric MAC layer also places relatively more of the network processing on user equipment (UE) (e.g., a UE identifies a first serving cell upon initially accessing the network, and then identifies and monitors handover targets (other serving cells) as part of its mobility management).
Thus, improvements in wireless communication systems may be desired.