Design and implementation of a wideband channel emulation platform for 5G mmWave vehicular communication

Abstract

In this study, the authors design and implement a real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) wideband high-velocity channel emulation platform for the performance evaluation and verification of 5G mmWave systems. A novel spectral splitting & stitching method and channel partitioning algorithm are developed to synchronously combine up to eight 160 MHz sub-channels. The HIL platform was calibrated in the time and frequency domains and then validated using back-to-back results from a pair of experimental 60 GHz mmWave modems. The emulated path loss was generated for an additive white Gaussian noise channel to characterise the data throughput versus signal-to-noise ratio for a fixed point-to-point deployment. The wideband emulator was then used to introduce the Doppler shifts and spreads observed in a high velocity (up to 600 km/h) mmWave channel. For a Ricean channel (K-factor greater than or equal to 10 dB), negligible data throughput losses were observed for velocities up to 293.9 km/h. Using the emulator, they show that the 5G modems can achieve continuous connectivity (albeit with some throughput loss) at velocities up to 587.8 km/h. Tests were also conducted in Rayleigh channels with uniformly distributed spatial multipath. In the Rayleigh case, the maximum vehicular velocity dropped to 51.4 km/h.