Evaluation Engineering - 24

SOFTWARE

looking at coverage analysis, the strength
of a link, and that type of thing. And then
in millimeter wave, the types of channels
use different technologies than are being
used at lower frequencies.
It is not quality of experience per se,
but channel modeling is an area that's
really critical, and we see that the basestation providers and the carriers are
equally interested in that and are trying
to understand those propagation characteristics. What happens when you
are in an urban area and your signal is
bouncing off buildings or being absorbed
by materials in ways you didn't have to
worry about with lower frequencies? In
LTE also there is an interest in that kind
of scenario planning-where do I put my
base stations, how does that affect coverage, what is the impact of terrain and
buildings and those types of effects? So,
we have introduced some capabilities in
terms of the visualization and analysis,
and I think we are certainly seeing an interest from customers that is motivating
us to keep investing in that.

technology, or communication between
vehicles, you want to be able to track
mobility. If you were designing such a
system you would want to know where
the vehicles are, how fast they are going,
what other sensor modes they are using
to detect the presence of other vehicles
or obstacles, and then how they are communicating with each other. And we see
some interesting university research in
this area. One university is doing this
type of analysis from the perspective of
fuel consumption. You can use vehicular communication networks to detect
traffic patterns so you can brake more
efficiently or accelerate more efficiently
and basically optimize fuel consumption
that way. I think it will have an impact on
those designs just as vehicular communications is certainly a market for wireless
technologies. It works both ways.
You also mentioned Industrial IoT.
One customer just gave a talk at one of
our MATLAB EXPO conferences that
was about replacing Ethernet in factories with the new 802.11ax, sometimes

"What happens when you are in an urban area and your
signal is bouncing off buildings or being absorbed by
materials in ways you didn't have to worry about with
lower frequencies?"
RN: In our December issue, in addition to
the 5G report, we had an interview with
one of your colleagues, Philipp Wallner,
industry manager for industrial automation and machinery at MathWorks,
who discussed the Industrial IoT.2 He
described a New Zealand energy company that continually (every 30 minutes
or so) uses Simulink models to optimize
the grid load and make sure the grid
will continue to operate (for the next
30 minutes). It seems there should be
something analogous for a 5G network.
KK: Exactly. Can you design a network
that will actually support this traffic?
There is an interesting emerging interaction between the world of automated
driving and autonomous vehicles and the
next generation of wireless infrastructure.
If you think about the extent to which
the industry adopts the 5G version of V2X

EVALUATION ENGINEERING FEBRUARY 2020

called Wi-Fi 6. They are looking to see
whether they can get low enough latency
in a Wi-Fi system so that you can actually do industrial control using wireless
technology as opposed to cables.
And they've done enough research to
see that it is a promising proof of concept,
and his talk was about how they are using MathWorks tools to do the modeling
of the modifications they would need to
make the standard able to achieve the required latency, and they are prototyping
the proposed system on some programmable SDR type of hardware. It's not 5G,
but 802.11ax is the Wi-Fi equivalent of 5G
with many of the same issues relating to
new antenna technologies influencing the
design of the baseband and tradeoffs between throughput and latency. There are
many of the same considerations-just in
a Wi-Fi world, not a cellular world.

RN: One industry expert said 5G is moving from the relative friendly trial phase
to the much less friendly environments
of commercial deployments. Would you
agree with that?
KK: Absolutely. I would say yes because
there are large investment decisions and
considerations regarding consumer acceptance and qualifications. The degree
of testing that's required to achieve the
quality of experience that the consumer
wants is quite different from the testing you would do in a lab to determine
whether one device can talk to another
one successfully.
RN: You have commented on the simulation of scatterers in multipath environments. Do you use real-world data
for this?
KK: We can bring in external sources
where you can put terrain on the map
so you have real data about elevation of
mountains and other terrain aspects, and
we recently introduced the ability to take
open street-map data to put buildings on
the map as well. We don't yet have the
building properties, so you can't tell yet
whether it's a glass building or a brick
building, but you can tell that the building is there and how tall it is. Also, we
introduced some ray-tracing technology-which is incorporated in channel
models that are used to determine how
something will reflect off a building surface and how that affects the reception. It
answers the question, can you get a signal
from point A to point B successfully in
that type of environment?
RN: What next, 6G?
KK: Certainly, we try to stay in touch
with the academics who are doing that
type of work. And at the 2019 Brooklyn
5G Summit, the keynote discussed 6G. 3
So there is certainly research on 6G. But
in the near term, there is still the 3GPP's
Release 16, which is still 5G. What's more
immediate in terms of what's next are the
other use cases that were envisioned for
5G. So, we have mobile broadband that
is starting to be deployed, but the low

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