I’ve been working on a tool that will let me visualize the PDCCH resources in NR, and I will show and discuss some of its features in this post. I’ve always thought that one way to understand something is to program a computer to do it. In the job of doing that, I typically find out gaps in my knowledge or even more so, areas for which I had only a superficial understanding for - ““The best way to understand something is to teach it to a computer” [1].

This post will be about some reflections I had when reading about the frequency resource allocation in 5G NR. I will specifically discuss frequency resource allocation on DL since this is the area I’ve been reading about. In addition to giving a short description of resource allocation in 5G NR, I set out to answer the following questions: Why are the nominal resource block group (RBG) sizes the values they are?