Hardware simulator design for LTE applications with time-varying MIMO channels

A hardware simulator facilitates the test and validation cycles by replicating channel artifacts in a controllable and repeatable laboratory environment. This paper presents new frequency domain and time domain architectures of the digital block of a hardware simulator of MIMO propagation channels. The two architectures are tested with LTE standard, in outdoor environment, using time-varying channels. The new architectures of the digital block are presented and designed on a Xilinx Virtex-IV FPGA. Their accuracy and latency are analyzed. The result shows that the architectures produce low occupation on the FPGA and have a small relative error of the output signals.