Design and development of mobile channel simulators using digital signal processing techniques

Abstract

A mobile channel simulator can be constructed either in the time domain using a tapped delay line filter or in the frequency domain using the time variant transfer function of the channel. Transfer function modelling has many advantages over impulse response modelling. Although the transfer function channel model has been envisaged by several researchers as an alternative to the commonly employed tapped delay line model, so far it has not been implemented. In this work, channel simulators for single carrier and multicarrier OFDM system based on time variant transfer function of the channel have been designed and implemented using DSP techniques in SIMULINK. For a single carrier system, the simulator was based on Bello's transfer function channel model. Bello speculated that about 10Βτ(_MAX) frequency domain branches might result in a very good approximation of the channel (where в is the signal bandwidth and τ(_MAX) is the maximum excess delay of the multi-path channel). The simulation results showed that 10Bτ(_MAX) branches gave close agreement with the tapped delay line model(where Be is the coherence bandwidth). This number is π times higher than the previously speculated 10Bτ(_MAX).For multicarrier OFDM system, the simulator was based on the physical (PHY) layer standard for IEEE 802.16-2004 Wireless Metropolitan Area Network (WirelessMAN) and employed measured channel transfer functions at the 2.5 GHz and 3.5 GHz bands in the simulations. The channel was implemented in the frequency domain by carrying out point wise multiplication of the spectrum of OFDM time The simulator was employed to study BER performance of rate 1/2 and rate 3/4 coded systems with QPSK and 16-QAM constellations under a variety of measured channel transfer functions. The performance over the frequency selective channel mainly depended upon the frequency domain fading and the channel coding rate.