As of 2025, while the deployment of 5G continues to advance, research and development of next-generation communication technologies toward the 6G era of the 2030s is gaining momentum worldwide. Mobile communication technologies are becoming increasingly advanced, multifunctional, and complex—making it no longer feasible for a single country or company to build and maintain communication infrastructure alone. In this context, innovation and market activation through open-source approaches are being strongly demanded.

At the center of this movement is OpenAirInterface (OAI), a full-stack implementation of 5G standard specifications in open-source software. OAI is characterized by a flexible licensing model—freely available, modifiable, and commercially usable—which has led to its broad application in everything from academic research and experimental trials to commercial feasibility studies. However, running OAI stably and achieving high-performance communication requires the optimal combination of software, CPU, OS, and hardware, along with extensive configuration and tuning expertise.

This is where OAIBOX, an all-in-one open-source 5G base station for experimental and research use, comes in. Built on top of OAI, OAIBOX supports a wide frequency range including FR1 (Sub-6), FR2 (mmWave), and FR3 (7–24 GHz), and offers extensibility for next-generation features such as O-RAN compliance and AI integration. With an intuitive GUI, visualized communication metrics, and a fully optimized environment, OAIBOX is widely adopted for education, experimentation, research, prototyping, and proof-of-concept (PoC) activities.

In this talk, we will introduce the latest OAIBOX lineup and its various use cases, and present a vision for the future of next-generation mobile communication development brought about by the collaboration between OAIBOX and KKE (Kozo Keikaku Engineering Inc.).

Today, many industrial sites are focusing on the promotion of DX as a solution to labor shortages. In order to promote labor saving and automation, wireless communication is being actively introduced in such situations as on-site sensing, data linkage, and automatic control using robots. However, the difficulty of building and maintaining an uninterruptible wireless communication environment has become apparent in the process of promoting wireless communication in the field. In this presentation, we would like to discuss the possibilities of using digital twin technology to realize uninterruptible wireless communication, its creation value, and future prospects, after summarizing the challenges of wireless communication at various industrial sites that we have learned through our support of wireless communication at various sites.

The development of advanced wireless communication systems generally progresses through stages such as research, development, and verification. In particular, evaluating the performance of newly developed systems through verification experiments based on real-world usage scenarios is extremely important. However, conducting such verification experiments often faces several challenges, including obtaining licenses, the high cost of testing with physical devices, and managing interference with existing systems.

To overcome these challenges, digital twin technology — which utilizes emulation techniques to recreate the complex radio propagation characteristics of the real world in a high-fidelity and real-time virtual environment — is gaining attention in the wireless communication field.

There are two main approaches to modeling radio propagation characteristics: stochastic methods and deterministic methods. Of these, ray-tracing — a deterministic method — is notable for its ability to reproduce detailed multipath propagation by leveraging 3D building models and terrain data. Moreover, in high-frequency bands such as millimeter-wave and sub-terahertz, which are expected to play a key role in Beyond 5G and 6G, radio propagation is highly environment-dependent, making site-specific propagation models increasingly valuable.

In this context, the presenters have developed a platform that extends the open-source 5G base station “OAIBOX,” built on OpenAirInterface (OAI), with channel emulation capabilities. This platform enables real-time superimposition of multipath propagation characteristics onto radio signals, allowing for end-to-end evaluation of 5G communication from the core network to user equipment (UE) under specific channel environments. Additionally, since the platform is based on open-source software, it offers the flexibility to modify the radio access network protocols and core network functionalities, making it possible to perform comparative evaluations under identical channel conditions.

In this presentation, we will introduce the architecture of this platform and share examples of 5G wireless communication emulation conducted using this environment, along with the corresponding evaluation results.