High-Efficient Ray-Based Hardware Emulator for UAV Channel Digital Twin

Digital channel twin is a useful way to realize the fusion of physical and digital wireless channel, which can support visual analysis, performance optimization, and algorithm design for communication systems. Based on ray tracing (RT) method, a general non-stationary channel model with time-variant channel parameters is developed for dynamic unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication scenarios in this paper. To address the problem of huge resource consumption for ray generation, an iteration-based method for coefficient generation are proposed and implemented on a software defined radio (SDR) hardware platform. By utilizing the compact architecture with time-division (TD) scheme, the hardware resource of proposed method is significantly decreased by 30 % compared with look-up table (LUT) method. Meanwhile, hardware measurement results demonstrate that the properties of emulated channel, i.e., power delay profile (PDP) and Doppler power spectrum density (DPSD) are in good agreement with the RT simulation results.