Design and Verification of a Massive MIMO Channel Emulator for 5G/6G System Performance Testing

Channel emulator plays an essential role in 5G and 6G communication by enabling the reconstruction of wireless channels in a controlled laboratory environment. A novel massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channel emulator is presented in this paper for future communication. The proposed channel emulator operates at 0.4–6 GHz with 200 MHz bandwidth, consisting of an 80-channel transceiver, a local oscillator (LO) unit with forty independent and one common LO, a reference unit, a digital baseband unit, and a master control unit. The emulator demonstrates excellent RF performance, achieving a phase coherence of ±2° and an error vector magnitude (EVM) of 0.65% when utilizing the common LO configuration. The path loss, modeled as a large-scale channel model, is tested at the RF level and showed strong agreement with simulation results, validating the accuracy of the channel emulation. Additionally, the end-to-end system throughput rate performance is evaluated, further confirming the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed 80-channel MIMO channel emulator for future wireless communication applications.