A multi-criteria comparative analysis of different Rayleigh fading channel simulators

In this paper, an in-depth comparative analysis of the most accepted and approved Rayleigh fading channel simulators is presented. Our study addresses the three common methods for generating time-correlated Rayleigh fading processes: the inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT) method, the filtering white Gaussian noise (FWGN) method and the sum-of-sinusoids (SOS) method. Totally seven models, including the recently proposed models, are analyzed and compared with Clarke's reference model. We use four quantitative measures for judicious assessment of the quality of generated processes in terms of both first-order and second-order statistics. Additionally, these measures cover analysis in time domain as well as in frequency domain. An evaluation of the computational effort is also depicted. The simulation results suggest that the recently published Wang's model is very attractive and it outperforms all SOS-based models. We conclude that Zheng and Xiao's first model remains the best choice among Zheng and Xiao's family models. Several other important remarks and conclusions about the accuracy and the capability of the different Rayleigh fading simulators are driven from this study.