FPGA-Based Channel Simulator for a Wireless Network Emulator

Wireless channel emulators are important tools for testing radio devices, especially in mobile environments. Wireless network emulators give the same accuracy and control for testing radio network systems that traditional channel emulators give to point to point radio links. Network emulators require many more independent channels than traditional channel emulators. This problem is particularly challenging for the real time channel simulator in the emulator. The challenges of designing a wireless network channel simulator are discussed and a design is presented on a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA. This channel simulator can model 210 independent channels between 15 nodes with a bandwidth of 90 MHz. The performance of the design was verified by measuring transport-layer throughput between 802.11b radios transmitting through the channel simulator.