MIMO Hardware Simulator: Algorithm Design for Heterogeneous Environments

Bachir Habib, Gheorghe Zaharia, Ghais El Zein

Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications of Rennes, Rennes, France.

DOI: 10.4236/cs.2013.42029                

Abstract

A wireless communication system can be tested either in actual conditions or by a hardware simulator reproducing actual conditions. With a hardware simulator it is possible to freely simulate a desired type of a radio channel and making it possible to test “on table” mobile radio equipment. This paper presents an architecture for the digital block of a hardware simulator of MIMO propagation channels. This simulator can be used for LTE and WLAN IEEE 802.11ac applications, in indoor and outdoor environments. However, in this paper, specific architecture of the digital block of the simulator is presented to characterize a scenario indoor to outdoor using TGn channel models. The switching between each environment in the scenario must be made in a continuous manner. Therefore, an algorithm is designed to pass from a considered impulse response in the environment to another in other environment. The architecture of the digital block of the hardware simulator is presented and implemented on a Xilinx Virtex-IV FPGA. Moreover, the impulse responses are transferred into the simulator. The accuracy, the occupation on the FPGA and the latency of the architecture are analyzed.

Keywords

Hardware Simulator; MIMO Radio Channel; FPGA; 802.11ac Signal; Time-Varying TGn Channel Models

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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