There is no doubt that the New York University (NYU) WIRELESS academic research center is at the very center of 5G research and development. One specific area that is under investigation with regard to 5G millimeter-wave systems is channel emulation. In fact, NYU WIRELESS recently made headlines by revealing that it has developed what is believed to be the first commercial emulator for 5G millimeter-wave systems. While channel emulation has been used for quite some time, this article explains how researchers at NYU WIRELESS are redefining it for 5G.
Channel Emulation 101
Before discussing channel emulation for 5G systems, it is helpful to first present a brief introduction of channel emulation itself. Aditya Dhananjay, a postdoctoral research fellow at NYU as well as the co-founder and president of MilliLabs, is leading 5G channel emulation efforts at NYU WIRELESS. “Let’s says you are building base stations and cell phones and you want to test them,” Dhananjay says. “One way of testing them is by doing over-the-air (OTA) field trials.
“You take your base station and cell phone out into the real world and you test them to see how they do in different scenarios,” he continues. “Then you can see in the real world if the design is adequate.” Figure 1 shows a basic illustration of OTA testing.