Development of a MATLAB Toolbox for Mobile Radio Channel Simulators

Abstract

A profound knowledge of mobile radio channels is required for the development, evaluation, and also assessment at practical conditions of present and future mobile radio communication systems. The modelling, analysis, and simulation of mobile radio channels are important sub area since the initiation of mobile communications. In addition to that knowledge of channel behaviour in mobile radio communication is extensively recommended for the study of transmitter/receiver performances. Our intention in this master's thesis is to develop various kinds of mobile fading channel simulators using MATLAB and embed them into MATLB software as a toolbox.Implemented channel simulators were combined into a user-friendly Matlab toolbox from which users can easily select well-known channel models to test and to study the performance of mobile communication systems. The help file was developed based on HTML. It gives better support for the new users to work on the developed channel simulators, run the test procedures as well as parameter computation. The help file consistent with other supplementary programs like computation of PDF and CDF for different distributions, Rice simulation model, extended Suzuki process type I and II simulator etc. In addition to that each program consists with guidelines embedded with the source code. The help file web interfaces are listed in Appendix-1.The toolbox can be integrated into the new release of Matlab software.The toolbox contains channel simulators for simulating non-stationary land mobile satellite channel, spatial shadowing processes, MIMO channels, multiple uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels, mobile to mobile channel, frequency hopping channels etc. We developed set of test procedures, such as the autocorrelation function ACF, average duration of fades ADF, the probability density function PDF, and the level-crossing rate LCR etc., in order to test and to confirm the correctness of the implemented channel simulators. Proposed new algorithms to compute the model parameters of the channel simulators were also implemented in the toolbox to enable the parameterization of the channel simulators under specific propagation conditions. Finally, "how can a channel simulator be tested?" have been address in the thesis as a research question. It was based on the comparison of simulation results with the measured model or the reference model under different scenarios. In addition to that selection of the simulation time duration, sampling rate and size of the samples were considered. Developed test procedures were helped to assess the implemented channel simulators.Keywords: Matlab toolbox, parameter computation methods, Mobile fading channel simulators, Performance tests, Deterministic channel modelling.ii PrefaceThis thesis was based on the Master thesis work carried out between January and May 2011 at Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Agder, Grimstad, Norway. It was based on the implementation of the mobile radio channel simulators which were based on one of the li...