Mobile RF Scenario Design for Massive-Scale Wireless Channel Emulators

Abstract

Large-scale wireless emulation is gaining momentum nowadays, thanks to its potential in the development and deployment of advanced use cases for next-generation wireless networks. Several novel use cases are indeed emerging, including massive MIMO, millimeter wave beamforming and AI-based Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) optimized communication. The development and testing of a wireless application, especially at a large scale and when dealing with mobile nodes, faces several challenges that cannot be solved by simulation frameworks alone. Thus, massive-scale channel emulators are emerging, enabling the emulation of realistic scenarios which leverage real hardware and radio signals. However, this is a complex task due to the lack of realistic scenarios based on real datasets. We thus propose a novel framework for the design and generation of channel emulation scenarios starting from real mobility traces, either generated by means of dedicated tools, or collected on the field. Our framework provides a practical way of generating mobility scenarios with vehicles, pedestrians, drones and other mobile entities. We detail all the steps foreseen by our framework, from the provision of the traces and radio parameters, to the generation of a matrix describing the delay and IQ samples for each time instant and node in the scenario. We also showcase the potentiality of our proposal by designing and creating a vehicular 5G scenario with 13 vehicles, starting from a recently-disclosed open dataset. This scenario is then validated on the Colosseum channel emulator, proving how our framework can provide an effective tool for large-scale wireless networking evaluation.