Field simulator for Rayleigh/Rician fading reproduction

This paper presents a field simulator to reproduce the propagation environment as indoor facilities, simulating the outdoor and indoor multipath fading environment. The field simulator is required to reproduce Rayleigh or Nakagami-Rice fading, handover simulation in a cellular system, arbitrary time delay spread, frequency selective fading, and Doppler fading. To satisfy the above requirements, we propose a field simulator consisting of a few pairs of transmitting antennas installed inside a cavity the walls of which are covered with conducting or absorbing materials. The simulator is of a simple configuration of compact size. The cavity is an oversized waveguide for exciting the many higher order modes disturbing the internal field distributions, and the amplitudes and phases of the exciting antenna are controlled as a time dependent function for changing the fields at a specified position in the simulator. This simulator configuration provides Rayleigh or Nakagami-Rice field distributions as the reproduced propagation environment. The characteristics of the field simulator are calculated by the ray tracing and mode matching methods. The numerical results show that three pairs of dipole antenna installed inside the cavity satisfy the requirements of the field simulator by selecting the location of antennas and phase varying function.