The Design And Development Of MIMO Channel Emulator For LTE System

Channel emulator is an important tool to evaluate the performance of a communication system.3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE), the latest standard in the mobile network technology tree and a step towards 4G is widely studied and launched in market. In LTE, multiple-input and multiple-output technology (MIMO) is introduced, so the wireless channel to embody LTE characters is a MIMO channel which is different from other traditional communication systems'. In order to further study and evaluate the performance of LTE system, a practical design of MIMO channel emulator for LTE is laid out.This paper summarized the methods for channel modeling. Flat fading and frequency selective fading models of small-scale fading are discussed and Jakes model to generate Rayleigh fading is studied in detail; How to set up vector MIMO channel is explained in general before introducing two kinds of 3GPP LTE models:SCME and extended ITU with spatial correlation. Afterwards, the two methods are analyzed and compared, and the E-ITU model suitable for hardware implementation is selected as the key research content.For Jakes, some improvements are made to achieve better statistical property. Based on improved Jakes and extended ITU model, a LTE-MIMO channel emulator suitable for DSP + FPGA platform is designed. The design is verified by software simulation before implemented on picoChip DSP and Xilinix Virtex-5 FPGA. Finally, the implementation is tested for functionality and reveals good statistical property.