High performance channel model hardware emulator for 802.11n

In this paper, the design and implementation of a new high performance hardware channel emulator is presented. The purpose of the developed emulator is to efficiently reproduce in a laboratory environment the accurate behaviour of several effects of the radio channel over a multiple antennas wireless communication system, including AWGN (additive white Gaussian noise), multipath, attenuation and Doppler shift. The main application target is the test and the performance evaluation of a new 802.11n transceiver. The prototype has been implemented on a board including both an ARM processor and a field programmable gate array (FPGA), and it supports the simulation of a 40 MHz radio frequency bandwidth.