Site-Specific Radio Channel Representation for 5G and 6G

TL;DR

This paper introduces a site-specific radio channel representation (SSCR) that models environment geometry and material properties to accurately simulate 5G and 6G wireless channels across diverse scenarios, ensuring spatial consistency and adaptability.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel SSCR method that dynamically models environment geometry and materials, enabling accurate, spatially consistent channel simulations for advanced wireless systems.

Findings

SSCR models environment geometry and materials for realistic channel simulation.

SSCR ensures spatial correlation and non-stationary statistical properties.

Potential to support 5G/6G technologies like MIMO, intelligent surfaces, and joint communication-sensing.

Abstract

A site-specific radio channel representation (SSCR) takes the surroundings of the communication system into account by considering the environment geometry, including buildings, vegetation, and mobile objects with their material and surface properties. We present methods for an SSCR that is spatially consistent, such that mobile transmitter and receiver cause a correlated time-varying channel impulse response and closely spaced antennas are correctly correlated. An SSCR is composed of a dynamically varying number of multipath components solely defined by the environment geometry and the material of the environmental objects. Hence, the environment geometry is the only natural scenario parameterization and specific calibration procedures shall be avoided. 5G and 6G physical layer technologies are increasingly able to exploit the properties of a wide range of environments from dense urban areas to railways, road transportation, industrial automation, and unmanned aerial vehicles. The channel impulse response in this wide range of scenarios has generally non-stationary statistical properties, i.e., the Doppler spectrum, power delay profile, K-factor and spatial correlation are all spatially variant (or time-variant for mobile receivers). SSCRs will enable research and development of emerging 5G and 6G technologies such as distributed multiple-input multiple-output systems, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, multi-band communication, and joint communication and sensing. We highlight the state of the art and summarize research directions for future work towards an SSCR.