Compact Hardware Multiple Input Multiple Output Channel Emulator for Wireless Local Area Network 802.11ac

This paper proposes a fast-processing and low-cost hardware multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channel emulator. The channel emulator is an important component of hardware-based simulation systems. The novelty of this work is the use of sharing and pipelining functions to reduce hardware resource utilization while maintaining a high sample rate. In our proposed emulator, the samples are created sequentially and interpolated to ensure the sample rate is equal to the base band rate. The proposed 4 × 4 MIMO requires low-cost hardware resource so that it can be implemented on a single field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. An implementation on Xilinx Virtex-7 VX980T was found to occupy 10.47% of the available configurable slice registers and 12.58% of the FPGA's slice lookup tables. The maximum frequency of the proposed emulator is 758.064 MHz, so up to 560 different paths can be processed simultaneously to generate 560 × 758 million × 2 × 32 bit complex-valued fading samples per second.