A Scalable Spatial–Temporal Correlated Non-Stationary Channel Fading Generation Method

• Published in: Electronics (Basel) Vol. 12; no. 19; p. 4132
• Main Authors: Fang, Sheng, Mao, Tongbao, Hua, Boyu, Ding, Yuan, Song, Maozhong, Zhou, Qiangjun, Zhu, Qiuming
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.10.2023
• Subjects: Algorithms; Antennas; Communications systems; Complexity; Consumption; Design and construction; Digital integrated circuits; Emulators; Fading; Fading channels; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; Methods; MIMO communication; MIMO communications; Propagation; Random access memory; Simulation; Time division multiplexing; China
• ISSN: 2079-9292; 2079-9292
• DOI: 10.3390/electronics12194132

To address the challenges of complex implementation structures and high hardware resource consumption in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel emulators, this paper proposes a hardware generation method for spatial–temporal correlated non-stationary channel fading. Firstly, a hardware generation architecture is developed for field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platforms, which can also reduce the complexity of the channel emulator. Secondly, an improved CORDIC method is introduced to reduce algorithm latency and hardware consumption while expanding the function convergence domain, with a relative error maintained at the level of 10-4. Furthermore, based on the idea of time-division multiplexing, an efficient hardware operation of a lower triangular matrix is adopted to minimize the consumption of hardware resources. Finally, the measured results demonstrate that the statistical characteristics of the channel fading generated by the proposed method are in good agreement with the theoretical ones, with an average error of less than 2%. Additionally, under identical simulation conditions, hardware resource consumption is reduced by 6.87%. These findings provide compelling evidence of the enhanced efficiency and accuracy in simulating MIMO channels achieved through the proposed method.