Trends and Challenges in Wireless Channel Modeling for an Evolving Radio Access

TL;DR

This paper reviews the evolving landscape of wireless channel modeling driven by 5G, Massive MIMO, and mmWave, highlighting new challenges, modeling tools, and approaches to meet future radio access requirements.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of current channel modeling techniques addressing the increased complexity of 5G and beyond, emphasizing new tools and challenges.

Findings

Channel models must accommodate diverse frequency bands and deployment scenarios.

New modeling tools are being developed to handle increased complexity and heterogeneity.

Community efforts focus on balancing accuracy and efficiency in future models.

Abstract

With the advent of 5G, standardization and research are currently defining the next generation of the radio access. Considering the high constraints imposed by the future standards, disruptive technologies such as Massive MIMO and mmWave are being proposed. At the heart of this process are wireless channel models that now need to cover a massive increase in design parameters, a large variety of frequency bands, and heterogeneous deployments. This tutorial describes how channel models address this new level of complexity and which tools the community prepares to efficiently but accurately capture the upcoming changes in radio access design. We analyze the main drivers behind these new modeling tools, the challenges they pose, and survey the current approaches to overcome them.