Design of Transmitter for CDM Based 2×2 Multiple Input Multiple Output Channel Sounder for Multipath Delay Measurement

Problem statement: Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) wireless communication system is an innovative solution to improve the bandwidth efficiency by exploiting multipath-richness of the propagation environment. The degree of multipath-richness of the channel will determine the capacity gain attainable by MIMO deployment. Approach: Therefore, it is very important to have accurate knowledge of the propagation environment/radio channel before MIMO implement. The radio channel behavior can be anticipated by channel measurement or channel sounding. Code Division Multiplexing (CDM) is one of the channel sounding techniques that allow accurate measurement at the cost of hardware complexity. CDM based channel sounder, requires code with excellent autocorrelation and cross-correlation properties which generally difficult to be achieved simultaneously. Results: In this study, an efficient transmitter for CDM-based 2×2 MIMO channel sounding technique with Loosely Synchronous (LS) codes is designed. Simulation results shows that the channel sounding scheme using LS codes gives very good performance for measuring 2×2 MIMO channel behavior. The BPSK transmitter is designed using MATLAB, Verilog and Xilinx system generator blocks. Conclusion: The whole design is simulated as a single ISE project by using ModelSim simulation tool and compiled using ISE 9.2. However the proposed design of transmitter using LS code of length 8190 bits can measure multipath delay of minimum 0.13 μs and maximum 520 μs.