Key technologies for wireless network digital twin towards smart railways

An emerging railway technology called smart railway promises to deliver higher transportation efficiency,enhanced comfort in services,and greater eco-friendliness.The smart railway is expected to integrate fifth-generation mobile communication(5G),Artificial Intelligence(AI),and other technologies,which poses new problems in the construction,operation and maintenance of railway wireless networks.Wireless Digital Twins(DTs),which have recently emerged as a new paradigm for the design of wireless networks,can address these problems and enable the whole lifecycle management of railway wireless networks.However,there are still many scientific issues and challenges for railway-oriented wireless DT.Relevant key technologies to solve these problems are introduced and described,including characterization of materials'physical-EM properties,autonomous reconstruction of Three-dimensional(3D)environment model,AI-empowered environmental cognition,Ray-Tracing(RT),model-based and AIbased RT acceleration,and generation of multi-spectra sensing data.Moreover,this paper presents our research results for each key technology and describes the wireless network planning and optimization system based on highperformance RT developed by our laboratory.This paper outlines the framework for realizing the wireless DT of smart railways,providing the direction for future research.

User Association and Wireless Backhaul Bandwidth Allocation for 5G Heterogeneous Networks in the Millimeter-Wave Band

The user association and wireless backhaul bandwidth allocation for a two-tier heterogeneous network(Het Net) in the millimeter wave(mm Wave) band is proposed in this article. The two-tier Het Net is built up with a macro base station(MBS) and several small cell SBSs, where the MBS is assumed to be equipped with large-scale antenna arrays but the SBSs only have single-antenna capability and they rely on the wireless link to the MBS for backhaul. The sum of logarithmic user rate, which is established according to the result of multi-user Multiple Input Multiple Output(MIMO) downlink employing Zero-Force Beamforming(ZFBF), is chosen as the network utility for the objective function. And a distributed optimization algorithm based on primal and dual decomposition is used to jointly optimize the user association variable xj,i and the wireless backhaul bandwidth factor β. Simulation results reveal that the distributed optimization algorithm jointly optimizing two variables outperforms the conventional SINR-based user association strategies.

Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Channel Characterization in Urban Environment at 28 GHz

Both ultra-reliable low latency and high-data-rate communications are required by connective vehicles. Millimeter wave(mm Wave) with large bandwidth is a key technology to support high-data-rate communications. In this paper, the 28 GHz wideband vehicle-to-infrastructure channel is characterized for the urban environment in a major street in Manhattan. The deployment of the transmitter and the receiver, as well as the traffic models, are selected by considering the recommendation by 3GPP TR 37.885. Ray tracing simulator with calibrated electromagnetic parameters is employed in this work to practically conduct intensive simulations. The 3D environment model is reconstructed from OpenStreetMap. The power delay profile, path loss, root-meansquare delay spread, K-factor and so on, are extracted from the calibrated simulation results. The evolution of the parameters, as well as their statistical properties, are analyzed and modeled. The work of this paper helps the researchers understand the propagation channel for designing mmWave technologies and communication system in a similar scenario.

Towards 6G: Paradigm of Realistic Terahertz Channel Modeling

Terahertz(THz)communications are envisioned as a key technology for the sixth-generation wireless communication system(6G).However,it is not practical to perform large-scale channel measurements with high degrees of freedom at THz frequency band.This makes empirical or stochastic modeling approaches relying on measurements no longer stand.In order to break through the bottleneck of scarce fulldimensional channel sounding measurements,this paper presents a novel paradigm for THz channel modeling towards 6G.With the core of high-performance ray tracing(RT),the presented paradigm requires merely quite limited channel sounding to calibrate the geometry and material electromagnetic(EM)properties of the three-dimensional(3D)environment model in the target scenarios.Then,through extensive RT simulations,the parameters extracted from RT simulations can be fed into either ray-based novel stochastic channel models or cluster-based standard channel model families.Verified by RT simulations,these models can generate realistic channels that are valuable for the design and evaluation of THz systems.Representing two ends of 6G THz use cases from microscopy to macroscopy,case studies are made for close-proximity communications,wireless connections on a desktop,and smart rail mobility,respectively.Last but not least,new concerns on channel modeling resulting from distinguishing features of THz wave are discussed regarding propagation,antenna array,and device aspects,respectively.

Indoor massive multiple-input multiple-output channel characterization and performance evaluation

We present a measurement campaign to characterize an indoor massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel system, using a 64-element virtual linear array, a 64-element virtual planar array, and a 128-element virtual planar array. The array topologies are generated using a 3D mechanical turntable. The measurements are conducted at 2, 4, 6, 11, 15, and 22 GHz, with a large bandwidth of 200 MHz. Both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) propagation scenarios are considered. The typical channel parameters are extracted, including path loss,shadow fading, power delay profile, and root mean square (RMS) delay spread. The frequency dependence of these channel parameters is analyzed. The correlation between shadow fading and RMS delay spread is discussed. In addition, the performance of the standard linear precoder—the matched filter, which can be used for intersymbol interference (ISI) mitigation by shortening the RMS delay spread, is investigated. Other performance measures,such as entropy capacity, Demmel condition number, and channel ellipticity, are analyzed. The measured channels,which are in a rich-scattering indoor environment, are found to achieve a performance close to that in independent and identically distributed Rayleigh channels even in an LOS scenario.

A Ray Tracing and Joint Spectrum Based Clustering and Tracking Algorithm for Internet of Intelligent Vehicles

Driven by the rapid growth in information services provided by the Internet and the appearance of new multimedia applications,millimeter wave is foreseen as a key enabler towards the Internet of intelligent vehicles(IoIV)for urban traffic safety enhancement.In this regard,cluster-based channel modeling has become an important research topic in the realm of emergency communications.To fully understand the cluster-based channel model,a series of vehicle-to-infrastructure(V2I)channel simulations at 22.6 GHz are conducted by a three-dimensional ray tracing(RT)simulator.The clustering and tracking algorithm is proposed and analyzed from three aspects by the obtained simulation results.The multiple signal classification estimation spectrum is applied to restrain the influence of antenna sidelobes and identify targets at first.Based on the fundamentals,the clusters can be identified and subsequently tracked using the proposed approach.The impacts of antenna sidelobes,angle resolution of beam rotation,and non-line-of-sight propagation path on the performance of clustering and tracking are evaluated.The multi-component-level RT results are adopted as comparison benchmarks,which reflect the ground truth.This work aims to provide a full picture of the clustering characteristics for designing and analyzing emergency communication systems.