A Compact Reverberation Chamber for Hyper-Rayleigh Channel Emulation

Recent propagation measurements conducted for emerging applications such as vehicle-to-vehicle communications and wireless sensor systems have illustrated that present worst-case channel models are not sufficient to characterize the small-scale propagation effects seen. New theoretical models have thus been proposed but existing emulation environments do not create sufficiently severe channel conditions. In this work we present the design of a compact, reconfigurable channel emulator (CRCE) specifically designed to create Ricean, Rayleigh and hyper-Rayleigh fading environments in a repeatable manner. The bench-top sized chamber leverages concepts seen in reverberation chambers but in addition to a mechanical stirrer varies the multipath environment through the use of multiple antennas. Emulated channels illustrating space-, time- and frequency-selective behaviors are presented.