A Hardware Based Ricean Fading Radio Channel Simulator

The rise of the need of fading radio channel simulators is due to time and cost of field tests of wireless communications systems. Growth in the demand for fixed wireless access increases the need for wide area system modeling. There exist two approaches to design a hardware based fading simulators, namely the filter based and sum of sinusoids (SOS) methods . This paper introduces a hardware based Ricean fading simulator that is based on SOS and utilizes empirical formulas that were derived based on extensive measurements to estimate the Ricean distribution K factor characterizing outdoor suburban and rural environments. The simulator presented here can simulate the Ricean fading radio channel under different parameters including antenna height, antenna beamwidth, season and distance between the transmitter and the receiver. Our experiments demonstrate that 8 channels are sufficient to accurately emulate a multipath environment.