Fast prototyping techniques applied to the hardware simulation of telecommunication systems

In this paper, an application of fast prototyping techniques to the hardware simulation of telecommunication systems is shown. In particular, a hardware simulator, based on a FPGA board, of a nonstationary satellite link for mobile communication is developed. For this kind of system, the complexity of the software simulation in term of computation time is often unacceptable, especially when the estimation of global quality factors, such as the bit error rate (BER), must be carried out. The hardware simulation of the system guarantees the reduction of the simulation time by several orders of magnitude.