Efficient Simulation of Ricean Fading within a Packet Simulator

Packet level network protocol simulators use simple channel models for computational efficiency. A typical method for doing this is to compute a packet error probability assuming a certain fading distribution without taking into account time-correlation. This paper introduces work that has been done to model the effect of small-scale fading (Rayleigh and Ricean) within the ns network simulatol: It allows for the faithful simulation of a complete fading envelope. The fading models have the appropriate statistics and also time correlational properties obtained from the Doppler spectrum. An efficient implementation based on a simple table lookup is described.