A reconfigurable hardware architecture for the simulation of Rayleigh fading channels under arbitrary scattering conditions

Owing to the constant evolution of modern communication systems, it is necessary to have channel simulators able of reproducing the channel characteristics with a high level of accuracy. Currently, hardware simulators are able to reproduce only scenarios with isotropic scattering conditions. In this paper, a novel reconfigurable hardware architecture for the efficient generation of Rayleigh fading waveforms with predefined autocorrelation properties is presented. The proposed architecture is based on the sum-of-sinusoids (SoS) method, and was devised to allow the simulation of mobile fading channels under isotropic and non-isotropic scattering conditions. Additionally, the sinusoids’ parameters of the hardware fading channel simulator can be configured for any stochastic or deterministic parameter computation method (PCM). Likewise, the proper performance of the designed hardware channel simulator is verified via simulation, where it is shown that the first and the second order statistics of the fixed-point Rayleigh fading waveforms match those of the waveforms generated in floating-point on a software platform. Hardware implementation results show an area reduction and an improvement in the sinusoid frequency resolution of the SOS based method (as precise as 1.9 μHz in this work), when compared with previous approaches.