On the generation of correlated Rayleigh fading envelopes for multi-antenna systems

A simple procedure is proposed for the generation of equal and unequal power correlated Rayleigh fading envelopes for multi-antenna systems with any desired correlation factors. Propagation delay spread and frequency separations are also considered for different transmission conditions. It employs iterative coloring of uncorrelated reference envelopes using real correlation matrix of envelopes rather than complex covariance matrix of the Gaussian samples as in conventional method. The proposed method can be used to study the effect of correlated fading on the performance evaluation of various multi-antenna systems including single user and multiuser multi-input multi-output (MIMO). Practical system scenarios are simulated to show the effectiveness of this technique. It is shown by simulation that the proposed technique provides high accuracy similar to existing methods with less computational complexity.