MIMO Hardware Simulator: Algorithm Design for Heterogeneous Environments
- 1 Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications of Rennes, Rennes, France
- 2 Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications of Rennes, Rennes, France
- 3 Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications of Rennes, Rennes, France
Abstract
A wireless communication system can be tested either in actual conditions or by a hardware simulator reproducing ac tual 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 hard ware simulator of MIMO propagation channels. This simulator can be used for LTE and WLAN IEEE 802.11ac appli cations, 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 architec ture are analyzed.
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