Simulating the Long Term Evolution physical layer

Research and development of signal processing algorithms for UMTS Long Term Evolution (LTE) requires a realistic, flexible, and standard-compliant simulation environment. To facilitate comparisons with work of other research groups such a simulation environment should ideally be publicly available. In this paper, we present a MATLAB-based downlink physical-layer simulator for LTE. We identify different research applications that are covered by our simulator. Depending on the research focus, the simulator offers to carry out single-downlink, single-cell multi-user, and multi-cell multi-user simulations. By utilizing the Parallel Computing Toolbox of MATLAB, the simulator can efficiently be executed on multi-core processors to significantly reduce the simulation time.