Hardware Link Level Emulator for System Level Simulations of WiMAX-Like Systems

This paper describes the Hardware Link Level Emulator (HLLE) developed for hardware acceleration of the system level simulations of the WiMAX-like OFDM and OFDMA systems. The proposed architecture of the HLLE including transmit pipeline, channel emulator, receive pipeline and control blocks is presented. The performance characteristics of the developed HLLE are provided. It is demonstrated that application of the HLLE may increase the speed of simulations in about 200 times for link level simulations relatively to the software only simulations done using the PC. The application of the HLLE to the system level simulations is discussed.