Plenary Lecture

Advanced Simulation and Modelling Techniques for
Mobile Radio Channels

Professor Matthias Patzold
Mobile Communications Group
Faculty of Engineering and Science
University of Agder
Grimstad, Norway
E-mail: matthias.paetzold@uia.no

Abstract: From the beginnings of mobile communication, there is a high demand for realistic models for mobile fading channels. The reason for the demand is that channel models are essential for the performance evaluation, parameter optimisation, and test of mobile communication systems. Design methods for mobile fading channels are therefore of great importance for system engineers who are involved in the development of present and future mobile communication systems.
In this presentation, an overview will be given about several design methodologies commonly used for the design of mobile radio channel models in present and future wireless communication systems. All presented channel models have in common that they are derived from a superposition of a finite number of complex sinusoids. However, the design methodologies differ in the way of computing the model parameters determining the statistical behaviour of the channel model. It will be shown that the proposed channel models are widely flexible, which allows an excellent fitting of their principal statistical properties against measurement data of real-world channels or against the statistics of any given reference channel model. Special interest will be paid to the state-of-the-art in modelling and simulation of mobile-to-mobile MIMO channel models as well as fading channel models for relay-based cooperative networks. The statistical properties of these channel models will be investigated analytically with emphasis on the distribution of the received envelope and with respect to the channels’ correlation properties in the space, time, and frequency domain. The obtained results show that the statistical properties of the channel models required for future mobile communication systems are quite different from the statistics of the channel models used in present mobile communication systems.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Matthias Patzold received the Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. degrees in electrical engineering from Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany, in 1985 and 1989, respectively, and the habil. degree in communications engineering from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Hamburg, Germany, in 1998. From 1990 to 1992, he was with ANT Nachrichtentechnik GmbH, Backnang, Germany, where he was engaged in digital satellite communications. From 1992 to 2001, he was with the Department of Digital Networks at the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg. Since 2001, he has been a full professor of mobile communications with the University of Agder, Grimstad, Norway. He authored four books and published more than 150 technical papers. His publications received eight best paper awards. He has been actively participating in numerous conferences serving as TPC chair and TPC member for more than 10 conferences within the last two years.
His current research interests include mobile radio communications, especially multipath fading channel modelling, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, MIMO-OFDM systems, cooperative systems, and space-time coding techniques for fading channels.