Hardware Implementation of Overlap-Save-Based Fading Channel Emulator

An efficient hardware implementation of correlated Rayleigh fading channel simulator is presented in this brief. It emulates Doppler effects based on the use of Overlap-Save (OLS) method. OLS is used for both, the fading variates generator and the time domain interpolator, leading to a scalable complete solution. Moreover, additional simplifications were introduced to reduce even further algorithmic complexity when compared with the original OLS-based proposal. An efficient hardware implementation is achieved through maximizing the utilization rate of allocated hardware resources. When added to its scalability, this makes the proposal appealing to emulate channels with multipath effects for MIMO systems. Indeed, the proposed parallel architecture enables a throughput of 34 Mega Samples per Second per path at a clock frequency of 275 MHz on Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA. The achieved throughput allows the support of the most demanding LTE configuration with 20 MHz channel bandwidth. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever real-time hardware implementation of OLS-based channel emulator.