Abstract: Athough the release 15 standardization work in the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) of fifth generation(5G) communication system has been frozen, the research on key technologies and performace evaluations of 5G will still be important in the next decade. Driven by the requirement of realistic and flexible evaluation platforms, which can offer real-world environment and real-time traffic, the emulation platform of 5G communication systems has been a hot research topic. In this paper, an emulation approach of 5G communication systems is proposed. Based on open air interface (OAI), the application cases, system model, hardware environment and software architecture are presented. Moreover, the proposed emulation method can be an efficent tool for researching beyond fifth generation (B5G) and sixth generation communication systems.

Key words: 5G, emulation platform, OAI