Investigation of Beyond 5G-based Physical Radio Node Emulation for Large-scale Wireless Emulator

In the Society 5.0 era, spectrum shortage and spectrum efficiency degradation will become more serious. To solve these problems, development of new radio systems and spectrum sharing technologies with primary systems is being promoted, while it takes a lot of time and cost to put them into practical use. In particular, field experiments using actual radio devices have difficulties in the evaluation in various environments with sufficient reproducibility, and it is more severe to perform large-scale field experiments using thousands of radio devices. A large-scale wireless emulator is one of the potential approaches to speed up these evaluations and allows users to evaluate wireless communication systems in a virtual environment according to an assuming scenario. This paper briefly overviews a concept of the large-scale wireless emulation platform and considers physical radio node emulation toward beyond 5th generation mobile communication system (B5G). Also, this paper presents initial evaluation results of physical radio emulation technologies including software defined radio (SDR)-based 5G new radio (NR) implementation, analog-to-digital/digital-to-analog (ADDA) interface prototype, and radiation pattern modeling.