Wideband RF Channel Emulation Platform for 5G mmWave Systems

Wideband channel emulation is a key component to testing 5G mmWave systems. In this paper we use a channel sounding system to validate a novel real-time Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) wideband channel emulator previously designed for the performance evaluation and verification of 5G mmWave systems. The HIL system was designed using novel spectral stitching and channel partitioning. The HIL platform is calibrated and validated in both the time and frequency domains. We then compare back-to-back results using a pair of 60GHz mmWave modems with results for the mmWave modems connected through the RF channel emulator via wideband I/Q up and down conversion. Finally, emulated path loss was generated for an Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel to characterize the data throughput versus Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for a fixed point-to-point deployment using the mmWave modems.