Numerically efficient generation of exponentially correlated two-dimensional shadowing

In wireless communication environments, shadow fading represents signal fluctuations around the average path loss of a transmitted signal due to the orientation of large obstructions in the way of the propagating electromagnetic waves. This paper aims at generating shadow fading maps that can be used in simulations of realistic mobile radio network scenarios. The focus is on achieving two-dimensional spatial correlation of the shadow fading values with low numerical burden. Instead of the standard filtering procedure that requires a numerically exhaustive two-dimensional convolution, we propose an iterative multi-stage algorithm that achieves close to ideal correlation properties among the shadow-faded random variables at a substantially higher computational speed.