MIMO hardware simulator design for outdoor time-varying heterogeneous channels

This paper presents a hardware simulator of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) propagation channels. The hardware simulator reproduces a desired radio channel and makes it possible to test “on table” different MIMO systems. A specific architecture of the digital block of the simulator is presented to characterize an outdoor scenario for Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. An algorithm is introduced to switch between the impulse responses and to control the time variation of the delays. The new architecture is designed on a Xilinx Virtex-IV Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Its accuracy, occupation on the FPGA and latency are analyzed.