  New Radio (NR) supports operations at high-frequency bands (e.g.,
millimeter-wave frequencies) by using narrow beam based directional
transmissions to compensate high propagation losses at such frequencies. Due to
the limited spatial coverage with each beam, the broadcast transmission of
paging in NR is performed using beam sweeping, which takes multiple time slots.
Thus, the paging procedure used in NR would substantially increase the downlink
resource overhead of the network with directional transmissions. Such overhead
would further increase as we move higher in the frequency bands, such as
terahertz bands, which is being viewed as one of the potential candidates for
future generation networks. Therefore, the NR based paging solution is
infeasible for supporting highly directional systems. In this paper, we propose
a novel minimal feedback enabled paging mechanism, which instead of using all
the beams for paging transmissions, only activates sub-set of beams having one
or more UEs under the coverage. UE presence indications are implemented to
identify the correct set of beams to be activated. Our analytical analysis and
simulations show that the proposed solution significantly reduces the downlink
paging overhead compared to the NR based solution (e.g., more than 80% gain for
a system supporting 64 number of beams at a UE density of 200 UEs per paging
occasion) while incurring minimal energy cost at the UE side.
