A comparative study of Rayleigh fading wireless channel simulators

Computer simulation is now increasingly being used for design and performance evaluation of communication systems. When simulating a mobile wireless channel for communication systems, it is usually assumed that the fading process is a random variate with Rayleigh distribution. The random variates of the fading process should also have other properties, like autocorrelation, spectrum, etc. At present, there are a number of methods to generate the Rayleigh fading process, some of them quite recently proposed. Due to the use of different Rayleigh fading generators, different simulations of the same communication system yield different results. Three methods, viz., the Jakes method, the IDFT method and the filtering WGN method, have been studied, simulated and compared based on the Rayleigh fading process' properties. Various communication systems have been simulated using the Rayleigh fading generators and the difference in the results, if any, have been analyzed. The research studies the different Rayleigh fading generators and compares them using the properties of the Rayleigh fading channel. It is found that the IDFT method and the filtering WGN method generate processes that have properties very close to the ideal Rayleigh fading process.