5G NR Waveform Generation and Over-the-Air Testing with MATLAB

Developing 5G New Radio (NR) wireless systems requires extensive simulation and testing. Being able to simulate the behavior of a system before building it provides significant cost benefits and greatly reduces the overall time it takes to release a new system into production. Despite all the benefits of simulation, eventually the system will need to be tested in real-world conditions using prototype transmitters and receivers. Over-the-air testing (OTA) plays an important role in this phase of system development. Whether you are simulating or testing your system over-the-air, MATLAB^® and Simulink^® can help you move your wireless system from early design through to production.

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📶 Compliance with standards — You need to design the transmitter and channel models in complete compliance with standards specifications. This means developing algorithms that represent the mathematical models described in 5G specifications documents.

📶 Algorithmic testing with required parameter coverage — You then must generate a slew of 5G compliant test signals to ensure that all possible modes of operation are covered. You also need to add various RF impairments and use a multitude of receiver models to recover the signal. All this adds to the complexity of testing the end-to-end link-level performance of the system. Here, metrics such as bit error rate (BER), block error rate (BLER), error vector magnitude (EVM), and throughput are used to verify that the system performance meets design specifications.

📶 Device-under-test verification — After all algorithms are implemented in hardware, you need to test the performance of the system with hardware-under-test using OTA transmission and/or reception.

📶 Integration testing and parameter optimization — Finally, you need to make sure the performance as expected by the standard can be achieved under various distortion conditions. Perform measurements to qualify at any given time how much distortion it can tolerate.