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Hardware Emulation of Wideband Correlated Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Fading Channels

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Abstract

A low-complexity hardware emulator is proposed for wideband, correlated, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) fading channels. The proposed emulator generates multiple discrete-time channel impulse responses (CIR) at the symbol rate and incorporates three types of correlation functions of the subchannels via Kronecker product: the spatial correlation between transmit or receive elements, temporal correlation due to Doppler shifts, and inter-tap correlation due to multipaths. The Kronecker product is implemented by a novel mixed parallel-serial (mixed P-S) matrix multiplication method to reduce memory storage and to meet the real-time requirement in high data-rate, large MIMO size, or long CIR systems. We present two practical MIMO channel examples implemented on an Altera Stratix III EP3SL150F FPGA DSP development kit: a 2-by-2 MIMO WiMAX channel with a symbol rate of 1.25 million symbols/second and a 2-by-6 MIMO underwater acoustic channel with 100-tap CIR. Both examples meet real-time requirement using only 12–14% of hardware resources of the FPGA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO, 65409, USA

    Fei Ren & Yahong Rosa Zheng

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  1. Fei Ren
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  2. Yahong Rosa Zheng
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Correspondence to Yahong Rosa Zheng.

Additional information

The work is supported in part by ONR under grant N00014-07-1-0219 and by NSF under grant ECCS-0846486.

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Ren, F., Zheng, Y.R. Hardware Emulation of Wideband Correlated Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Fading Channels. J Sign Process Syst 66, 273–284 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-011-0605-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-011-0605-y

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