Wireless communications are being stretched to new limits across a host of uses and technologies: From preparation for 6G cellular networks and implementation of AI in the RAN, to current testing of Wi-Fi 7/8, to broader adoption of satellite connectivity across both commercial and defense applications. No matter what the specific RF scenario, however, high-fidelity channel emulation is key to faster development and delivery of robust, reliable products.
With those challenges in mind, VIAVI Solutions has developed both cutting-edge capabilities and broad flexibility for its newly released Vertex 6.0 Channel Emulator. Drawing on both VIAVI’s in-house expertise plus advanced channel emulation capabilities acquired last year from Spirent Communications, Vertex 6.0 delivers critical support for cellular, Wi-Fi, satellite and defense wireless testing by enabling labs to reproduce real-world RF conditions with precision and repeatability.
In July of this year, 3GPP officially aligned on the channel bandwidth that 6G will support: Up to 400 megahertz in the uplink and the downlink. Vertex 6.0 is the first in the industry to natively support 400 megahertz of bandwidth, and it has FR1 coverage up to 7.125 GHz and FR3 coverage up to 23.5 GHz for the full range of potential 6G applications, according to Ian Wong, senior director of wireless and RF in the CTO’s Office at VIAVI Solutions. Meanwhile, in the Wi-Fi world, major equipment manufacturers are already taking advantage of Vertex’s support for wide channel bandwidth and 4096 QAM to put new Wi-Fi 7/8 products in their pipelines.
Specialization in ISAC
Even before the acquisition of Spirent’s emulation capabilities, VIAVI Solutions had been developing its own proprietary ray-tracing techniques and laying the ground-work to be able to handle processing of those highly complex scenarios on local hardware, Wong said. Those features have already been integrated in VIAVI’s flagship TM500 solution for user equipment emulation—and now, they have been added to Vertex 6.0 as well. That makes Vertex 6.0 particularly well-equipped to deliver deep insights on one of the most eagerly anticipated use cases for 6G: Integrated Sensing and Communications, or ISAC.
To this point, Wong said, most RF emulation has relied on statistical channel models.“We’ve moved on to much more site-specific, deterministic, high-fidelity RF emulation through ray-tracing, including ISAC,” he said. “A lot of folks want to be able to model moving objects like drones and cars, in addition to just the propagation environment.”
One of the major challenges with ISAC is accurately separating clutter, or “separating the birds from the drones,” as Wong put it. This is key to being able to benchmark sensing algorithms for key statistics like probability of detection, false alarms, and so on. VIAVI Solutions has developed the industry’s first ISAC-optimized ray tracer, optimized with a patent-pending algorithm designed to focus on the moving object, to help commercial and defense companies dig into the intricacies of ISAC.
“ISAC is clearly a hot topic, but what I sense is that a lot of folks underestimate the complexity and the difficulty,” Wong reflected. “You can make things work in an isolated case in a limited trial, but how does this really work at scale in a nationwide network? Those are things that with a product like this, you can really make sure that whatever we build and put out there, will work in the field.”
To learn more about Vertex 6.0 from VIAVI Solutions, go to: https://www.viavisolutions.com/en-us/products/vertex-channel-emulator
Vertex 6.0 underpins VIAVI’s RF Digital Propagation Twin, a specialized digital twin domain with the VIAVI Generative Reality Digital Twin (GRDT) framework. GRDT is a synchronized digital replica of a network with one or more federated domains and trained on high-fidelity, live, real-time network data. It is the environment where AI tests AI for faster innovation, validation, and network optimization.
