Idin‘s pick this week is Winner II Channel Model for Communications Toolbox by MathWorks Communications System Toolbox Team.

Contents

Background

The WINNER and WINNER II (or WINNER 2) channel models were developed through the WINNER (Wireless World Initiative New Radio) project in Europe for “beyond 3G” systems between 2004 and 2010. This File Exchange submission brings the final result of that project into MATLAB as a set of well-documented functions and classes.

Further Details on WINNER Project and WINNER models

Although the WINNER project web page is no longer online, you can access the final report of the project here. You can also watch a short video about these channel models here

Why is this important?

Accurate models of the physical world are a key part of most software simulations. In wireless communications modeling the “wireless” part, or the “channel”, is particularly challenging. Many different types of channel models have been proposed and used over the years. Each channel model works well for a given scenario (i.e. a system operating within a certain frequency range in a particular environment). The WINNER project was a large multi-year effort to develop channel models that worked well in the 2-6GHz range for signals of up to 100MHz bandwidth (see here).

The final phase of the WINNER project produced mathematical models (along with their software implementation) that are suitable for both single-antenna systems (SISO), and multi-input multi-output (MIMO) multi-user systems (if you are not familiar with that terminology, “MIMO” means systems that use multiple antennas at both the transmitter and the receiver). That means you can simulate scenarios like the one shown in the figure below. As the figure implies, the WINNER model can be used as both a link-level and a system-level model (i.e. it supports multiple links between different devices) as opposed to models that can only support a connection between one transmit/receive pair.

It is worth noting that the WINNER II channel models are related to the models used for simulation of wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11) systems, as well as 4G (LTE) and 5G mobile communication systems. A key point here is that WINNER II is a 2D model, whereas some of the newer models, especially ones used for 5G, are 3D models (e.g. WINNER+ or CDL).

What to do with this Submission?

Once you download and install this package, the first thing to do is type help winner2 at the MATLAB command prompt. That will give you a gateway to the documentation of the package, and the main functionality. Watching the video linked above will also give you a few snippets of code to try.

So Many Channel Models

The WINNER II channel models are only one of the many channel models that are now available in MATLAB. This page shows a more comprehensive list.

You will find all the standard textbook channel models: AWGN, Rayleigh and Rician fading channels, plus models for MIMO systems, and also the STDCHAN function that can generate a whole host of GSM, CDMA, and ITU-R channel models. In addition, the wireless standard toolboxes (WLAN Toolbox, LTE Toolbox, and the new 5G Toolbox) each contain channel models that are defined in the respective standards.

Comments

As always, your thoughts and comments here are greatly appreciated.

Get the MATLAB code

Published with MATLAB® R2018b