Abstract
The WiMAX communication system is mainly aimed at mobile users and has attracted popular attentions nowadays. In developing WiMAX related lab researches and products, a suitable channel emulator is indispensable. However, such equipments are rarely available. In the thesis, we are mainly aimed at the design and implementation of a wireless channel emulator suitable for WiMAX which can simulate the multipath fading effect in wireless channel. We choose the SUI model for 802.16d, 3GPP model for WCDMA, and Jakes’Model to simulate and implement the multipath fading effects of WiMAX. Besides, other channel effects such as frequency offset, path loss, AWGN, … etc., are also added to our WiMAX channel emulator. We first create a Graphical User Interface (GUI)-based software channel simulator before actually designing the channel emulator hardware. The GUI provides users with a convenient manual parameters input which allows users to choose/modify every environment parameters during the simulation process. The software channel simulator also provides detail insights of each module of the channel emulator to help emulator hardware design. It can also provide a convenient test bench in developing the channel emulator hardware. Full modularized system simulation let users observe the result of certain channel effect or the result of comprehensive channel effect. The simulation results and corresponding physical meanings can be easily displayed via the GUI simulation. According to the modularized simulation, we use Xilinx ISE and ModelSim to design and implement the channel emulator hardware. First, we implement and test each submodule, and then we assemble them into the channel emulator. Finally, the whole system is tested by Xilinx Active HDL and Matlab simulink. The test results of the channel emulator are compared with software simulation results to validate our hardware design. Finally, the synthesized working frequency, area and the numbers of multiplier used in our implemented channel emulator are discussed.