Simulation of MIMO Stochastic Fading Models:

 

[1] Baddour, K. E. and Beaulieu, N. C., “Accurate Simulation of Multiple Cross-
correlated
Rician Fading Channels,” IEEE Transactions on Communications,

vol. 52, pp. 1980-1987, Nov. 2004.

 

Early work appeared in:

 

[2] Baddour, K. E. and Beaulieu, N. C., “Accurate Simulation of Multiple Cross-
Correlated
Fading Channels,” IEEE International Conference on Communications

(ICC 2002), New York, NY, pp.267-271, April 28-May 2, 2002.

 

Significance:

The computer simulation of realistic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) fading channels is essential for evaluating the performance of practical space-time modem techniques in multiantenna wireless systems. In this contribution, we prove that existing Rayleigh/Rician multichannel fading simulators can only generate MIMO channels for which the temporal and spatial correlation statistics are separable and have the same functional form. A more comprehensive simulator is thus needed for the emulation of general MIMO stochastic fading channels. In [1], a multichannel generalization of the our AR simulator in [3] (see below) is developed to synthesize vector Rayleigh and Rician fading processes that possess specified realizable  joint space-time cross-correlation statistics.  The capability of the technique is demonstrated by the accurate simulation of general space-time-selective MIMO channel models that have recently appeared in the literature. Note that such models could not be simulated by previous methods. As proof of the usefulness of the proposed technique, we note that independent researchers (journal paper published in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. 53, pp. 634-643, May 2004) have cited our work and adopted our multichannel simulator design to investigate the outage capacity of MIMO channels with receiver motion and nonisotropic scattering at both ends of the link.

 

Simulation of Rayleigh Fading channels:

 

[3] Baddour, K. E. and Beaulieu, N. C., “Autoregressive Modeling for Fading

Channel Simulation,” to appear as a full paper in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2005 (in press).

 

Early work appeared in:

 

[4] Baddour, K. E. and Beaulieu, N. C., “Autoregressive Models for Fading Channel Simulation,” IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM 2001),

San Antonio, TX, pp. 1187-1192, Nov. 25-29, 2001.

 

Significance:

The emulation of mobile radio channels is of much theoretical and practical interest to the wireless community, as the design of modern communication systems cannot be carried out without computer simulations. In this work, a general easy-to-use autoregressive (AR) stochastic modelling approach is developed for the accurate computer simulation of time-selective wireless fading channels. Prior to this work, previous researchers had reported that AR models could not be used for accurate correlated fading simulation due to stability problems. In [3], it is shown that the deterministic nature of the bandlimited Doppler fading process is the cause of the numerical problems faced by AR simulators. A simple technique is suggested to resolve the stability issues while maintaining the statistical accuracy of the generated fading process. Theoretical analyses are carried out to verify  the validity of the proposed method, and start-up methods are presented to eliminate the need to discard many initial generated outputs due to transient distortion. Performance comparisons are then made with popular fading generation techniques to demonstrate the merits of the approach. The proposed simulator has comparable accuracy yet provides much smaller run times than competing sum-of-sinusoids simulators. Furthermore, the proposed method has the attractive property that fading variates can be generated as they are needed, which is a feature that is not possible by the memory intensive inverse fast Fourier transform (FFT) based simulators. Unlike competing approaches, the fading autocorrelation function is also easily specified, which makes the proposed AR simulator especially suited for the accurate emulation of nonisotropic/directional fading scenarios encountered in practical wireless communication systems.

 

 

Doppler Spread Estimation:

 

[5] Baddour, K. E. and Beaulieu, N. C., “Nonparametric Doppler Spread Estimation

for Narrowband Wireless Channels,” accepted for publication as a full paper in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2005.

 

Sections have appeared in:

 

[6] Baddour, K. E. and Beaulieu, N. C., “Nonparametric Doppler Spread Estimation

of Flat Fading Channels,” IEEE Wireless Communications & Networking Conf.

(WCNC 2003), New Orleans, Louisiana, pp. 953-958, Mar.16-20, 2003.

 

Significance:

A robust and computationally efficient nonparametric technique is proposed to estimate the Doppler spread of a narrowband wireless channel. This information is of significant value as it reveals the channel’s rate of change and can be used to improve the performance of many wireless communication subsystems. Prior to [5, 6], Doppler spread estimators were designed under the theoretical assumption that the channel exhibits Rayleigh fading with isotropic scattering. However, in a practical propagation environment these estimators can suffer from large biases since the scattering is often directional and may contain a line-of-sight component. In [5, 6] the proposed estimator is not based on the assumption of a specific Doppler spectral shape. Instead, a simple periodogram-based estimator is proposed which can be implemented using efficient FFT processing. We demonstrate that the resolution afforded from short observation windows permits good nonparametric estimates of the Doppler spread in a broad range of channels. We study the finite-sample accuracy of our estimation algorithm and compare it to that of the established techniques. Unlike the competing approaches, we find that the proposed estimator is robust over a broad range of Doppler rates, channel spectrum shapes and signal-to-noise ratio conditions.