Toward a Hardware Real Time SIMO Channel Emulator

Experience shows that the fading channel is one of the most time consuming element of a wireless system simulation, especially when dealing with multiple antennas. Any method that reduces this simulation time is thus welcomed. As an interesting solution, real time simulation using an hardware platform is the most commonly used, especially with the help of high level synthesis tools which will shrink the gap between system level simulations, written in C or C++, and hardware level. In this paper, we extend an existing model of Rayleigh faders with interesting complexity to a SIMO case. We show, analytically and by simulation, that the spatial correlation of our simplified channel model are in accordance with the expected one. For a more realistic model, we take into account the existence of angle spread scenario.