Development and Initial Implementation of Large-scale Wireless Emulator Toward Beyond 5G

Currently, the wireless emulator project is being conducted in Japan. This project is aiming at the development of a large-scale wireless emulation platform that enables high-speed and large-scale verification of emerging wireless communication systems and technologies in a virtual space. This platform imports a real environment as a three-dimensional model in a virtual space and applies radio wave propagation models to enable evaluation using physical radio devices. In addition, this platform implements thousands of virtual radio nodes completely built in software and enables large-scale emulation by interconnection between physical radio node and virtual node. This paper overviews the wireless emulator project with a proposed architecture of a large-scale wireless emulator. Also, the authors implement the fifth generation mobile communication system (5G) into software defined radio (SDR)-based radio devices and evaluate the performance with using the physical link emulator in the large-scale wireless emulator. The 5G performance is successfully confirmed even in a multipath environment. Finally, this paper introduces future prospects with developing viewer images for smart office and advanced intelligent transport system (ITS) scenarios.