National Institute of Telecommunications

The National Institute of Telecommunications – State Research Institute has expanded its research infrastructure with a hardware radio channel emulator. The purchase was financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education under the DIB program, and the equipment is now on site and ready for operation.

Sounds complicated? In practice, it comes down to something very concrete: the ability to recreate in a laboratory the conditions that radio waves encounter in the real world—whether in a city, at sea, in a high-speed train, or during satellite communications.

Unlike fiber optics or copper cables, a radio signal travels through an environment full of obstacles. It reflects off buildings, scatters, fades, and changes its parameters over time. Phenomena such as multipath propagation, interference, and the Doppler effect make designing reliable wireless communication a true engineering challenge.

The new emulator makes it possible to simulate all these phenomena with high precision. The device operates across a wide frequency range—from typical cellular bands to those used in Wi-Fi and specialized communication systems. It can reproduce multiple signal “paths” simultaneously—situations in which a radio wave reaches the receiver via different routes and with different delays—just as happens in a real city full of buildings.

The emulator also supports advanced multi-antenna configurations (MIMO), which form the basis of modern 4G and 5G networks. This makes it possible to study, among other things, beamforming—the intelligent “steering” of radio signals toward the user.

Until now, many such tests required costly and complex field campaigns: measurements at sea, on trains, in aircraft, or in difficult terrain. The emulator allows a large portion of this research to be moved into the laboratory while preserving realistic propagation conditions.

The device enables simulation of, among others, Rayleigh and Rician fading, Doppler effects related to terminal movement, interference, and various levels of background noise. Importantly, researchers can not only use ready-made, standardized radio channel models (e.g., those defined by 3GPP), but also create their own models based on real-world measurements.

This means significant savings in time, money, and logistics—as well as greater repeatability and control over experiments. Identical conditions can be recreated multiple times, something that is practically impossible in the real world.

The device supports, among others, multi-antenna MIMO configurations, beamforming, and carrier aggregation—technologies that are key to current and future 5G systems, as well as solutions still on the horizon. It also enables the study of data transmission quality: throughput, latency, packet loss, and connection stability under challenging radio conditions.

As a result, the Gdańsk laboratory gains new capabilities in researching transmission quality, device resilience to harsh radio environments, and the design of more reliable wireless systems.

Put simply: before new technologies reach users, they can undergo a controlled “earthquake in the ether”—within the safe conditions of a laboratory.