An FPGA-Based Simulator for High Path Count Rayleigh and Rician Fading

We present an ultracompact and fast hardware simulator for Rayleigh and Rician fading channels. To ensure numerical robustness and an efficient mapping onto hardware, the fading simulator uses the sum-of-sinusoids technique with N = 32 sinusoids added up to model each fading path. Fading samples are generated at a low rate and then are passed to an interpolator, which computes the final samples at the desired baseband rate. We propose a new time-multiplexed datapath that uses a differential approach. Instead of directly generating the fading samples, the datapath generates the discrete difference between fading samples. The proposed simulator is so compact that an entire 4 × 4 multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) fading channel can be implemented on a small fraction of a single field-programmable gate array (FPGA). On a Xilinx Virtex-4 XC4VLX200-11 FPGA, up to 1184 different paths can be simultaneously implemented while generating 1184 × 342 million 2 × 16-bit complex-valued fading samples per second.