A Study On MIMO Channel Characteristics And Implementation Based On Hardware

Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology can achieve larger channel capacity by exploiting Multiple transmit and receive antennas, without extra bandwidth demand. This is particularly useful in LTE system to help improve spectrum efficiency. MIMO technology, now, is a very promising field in communication research. Meanwhile, researches on MIMO channel are also fruitful.This paper analyses the characteristics of MIMO channel, and various kinds of modeling methodologies, including SCM and SCME models, which are based on ray radiation, and Kronecker model, which is based on antenna correlation. Then, specification on Kronecker modeling is given. It exploits an enhanced fading model, which is proved to be more advantaged comparing with traditional fading models. Next, a MIMO channel emulator based on Altera FPGA platform is introduced, which can be configured as 4 by 4 antennas,8 paths in total. In the end, test results comparing with theoretical simulation are presented.Modeling MIMO channel mainly consists of modeling for fading, multi-path, and addictive noise. The enhanced fading model is deduced to fit hardware. Multi-path structure can be modeled as tapped delayed line structure, which can be easily satisfied using filter technique in FPGA. Box-Muller algorithm makes it suitable to generate AWGN in hardware, and non-linear quantization is used to reduce RAM usage, thus improves efficiency.Besides, the channel emulator is tested, and performance can well suit the theoretical results under different configurations.