The race for 5G deployment began a long time ago, almost too long to remember. But finally, finally, we’re starting to see some of the rewards of all that effort. Rewards come in the form of better support for mobile streaming applications, machine-to-machine (M2M) and vehicle-to-vehicle communications (V2V or V2X), and low-power, low-latency IoT devices.

To properly harness this coming wave of technology, designers will need to manage areas that may or may not be new per se, but likely hadn’t been put into the same bucket before. For example, they’ll need to manage a physical layer architecture that’s combined with new RF and network backbone architectures. That’s coupled with new approaches to design and certainly new testing techniques.

One of the underlying building blocks for the latest version of 5G, Release 15, is hitting the streets, thanks to the efforts of the MathWorks. Its 5G Toolbox aims right at the heart of 5G standards-based system design, with a goal of helping reduce development time.

In a nutshell, the tool provides developers with a workflow to model, simulate and test 5G systems. It helps designers assemble critical algorithms and predict end-to-end link performance of systems that conform to the 5G specification. And it allows wireless design engineers to predict and customize system performance.

Specifically, the 5G Toolbox provides standards-compliant waveforms and reference examples for modeling, simulation, and verification of the physical layer of 3GPP 5G New Radio (NR) communications systems. The tool joins the company’s wireless communications product portfolio that also includes support for LTE and WLAN standards, simulation of massive MIMO antenna arrays and RF front end technologies, over-the-air testing, and rapid prototyping of radio hardware. 

The toolbox can be used for easier access to link-level simulation, golden reference verification, conformance testing, and test waveform generation. And all this can be done without having to start from scratch.