Keysight Collaborates With NTT DOCOMO and NTT on 6G Modeling

Keysight Technologies has partnered with NTT DOCOMO and NTT to advance realistic 6G channel modeling and wireless communication simulation. The project is part of an ongoing memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the companies aimed at developing 6G wireless communications design, testing, and measurement technologies.

Context of the Cooperation
As 6G research progresses, evaluating wireless system performance in complex real-world environments—such as urban areas, indoor venues, and transportation corridors—is increasingly critical. Physical field testing is financially costly and difficult to repeat, whereas simplified laboratory models often fail to capture the propagation effects that impact beamforming, mobility, and system reliability.

To overcome these challenges and evaluate next-generation wireless architectures before deployment, cooperation was required to achieve scalable and repeatable simulations. The collaboration merges Keysight’s testing and measurement capabilities with the telecommunications infrastructure and operational insights of NTT DOCOMO and NTT.

Technical Solution and Responsibilities
The partners are leveraging a technical approach that combines high-fidelity channel models with advanced ray-based propagation techniques. Responsibilities are divided between the companies to target specific components of next-generation wireless concept evaluation:

The combined system aims to provide researchers with greater confidence when evaluating the performance parameters of next-generation wireless designs.

Deployment or Implementation
The cooperative development has achieved initial milestones in measurement-driven channel modeling and distributed MIMO simulation. The technical solutions and findings generated from this collaboration will be integrated into future testing frameworks. Initial evaluation results from this joint work are scheduled to be presented at the EuCNC & 6G Summit 2026 in Malaga, Spain.

• Geometry-Based Stochastic Channel Models (GBSM): Standardized widely during 3GPP 5G-Advanced development, GBSMs use statistical probabilities to place environmental scatterers. While computationally efficient for conventional cell sites, they lack the spatial consistency required to simulate distributed MIMO systems where multiple antennas view the exact same physical space from different angles.

• Ray-Tracing / Deterministic Models: These rely on pure 3D electromagnetic solvers to simulate radio wave interactions with physical structures (reflections, diffraction, scattering). They offer high spatial consistency but demand immense computational resources and perfect 3D environmental mapping.

• Hybrid Measurement-Driven Ray Models: The method adopted in this collaboration blends empirical Channel Impulse Response (CIR) data with deterministic ray-tracing. This approach injects real-world fading, path loss, and material penetration parameters directly into the software solver, mitigating the baseline computational penalties of pure ray-tracing while maintaining real-world fidelity.

Edited by Romila DSilva, Induportals Editor, with AI assistance.