An Improved SOS-Based Fading Channel Emulator

We describe an improved scheme for simulating Rayleigh fading channels which accurately reproduces the required channel statistics. The new scheme is based on the sum- of-sinusoids Rayleigh fading model because of its flexibility and efficient mapping onto hardware. Using numerical simulation it is shown that the statistical properties of the generated fading variates, such as the probability density function, the autocorrelation, and the level crossing rate, follow the desired theoretical properties. A fixed-point implementation of the fading channel simulator on a field-programmable gate array utilizes only 5% of the configurable slices and generates over 200 million 16-bit fading variates per second.