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Ray-tracing (RT) simulators are essential for wireless digital twins, enabling accurate site-specific radio channel prediction for next-generation wireless systems. Yet, RT simulation accuracy is often limited by insufficient measurement data and a lack of systematic validation. This paper presents sitespecific location calibration and validation of NYURay, NYU’s in-house ray tracer, at upper mid-band frequencies (6.75 GHz and 16.95 GHz). We propose a location calibration algorithm that corrects GPS-induced position errors by optimizing transmitter-receiver (T-R) locations to align simulated and measured power delay profiles, improving T-R location accuracy by 42.3% for line-of-sight (LOS) and 13.5% for non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios. Validation across 18 T-R locations over distances from 40 to 880 m between transmitter and receiver shows excellent RT accuracy in path loss prediction, with path loss exponent (PLE) deviations under 0.14 when comparing measured versus RT predicted power at all T-R locations. While RT underestimates measured delay spread and angular spreads, their cumulative distributions remain statistically similar. The validated NYURay advances RT validation and provides reliable channel statistics for 6G deployment.
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Creating RF Scenarios for Large-scale, Real-time Wireless Channel Emulators
Recent years have seen the introduction of large- scale platforms for experimental wireless research. These platforms, which include testbeds like those of the PAWR program and emulators like Colosseum, allow researchers to prototype and test their solutions in a sound yet realistic wireless environment before actual deployment. Emulators, in particular, enable wire- less experiments that are not site-specific as those on real testbeds. Researchers can choose among different radio frequency (RF) scenarios for real-time emulation of a vast variety of different situations, with different numbers of users, RF bandwidth, antenna counts, hardware requirements, etc. Although very powerful, in that they can emulate virtually any real-world deployment, emulated scenarios are only as useful as how accurately they can capture the targeted wireless channel and environment. Achieving emulation accuracy is particularly challenging, especially for experiments at scale for which emulators require considerable amounts of computational resources. In this paper we propose a framework to create RF scenarios for emulators like Colosseum from rich forms of inputs, like those obtained by measurements through radio equipment or via software (e.g., ray-tracers and electromagnetic field solvers). Our framework optimally scales down the large set of RF data in input to the fewer parameters allowed by the emulator by using efficient clustering techniques and channel impulse response re-sampling. We showcase our method by generating wireless scenarios for Colosseum by using Remcom’s Wireless InSite, a commercial-grade ray-tracer that produces key characteristics of the wireless channel. Examples are provided for line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight scenarios on portions of the Northeastern University main campus.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1925601
- PAR ID:
- 10298726
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE MedComNet 2021
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1-8
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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