20 pagesInternational audienceA wireless communication system can be tested either in actual conditions or by using a hardware simulator reproducing actual conditions. With a hardware simulator it is possible to freely simulate a desired type of a radio channel. This paper presents architectures for the digital block of a hardware simulator of MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) propagation channels. This simulator can be used for LTE (long term evolution system) and WLAN (wireless local area networks) 802.11ac applications, in indoor and outdoor environments. The first architecture is appropriate for shipboard environments, while the second corresponds to outdoor-to-indoor environments and considers the wave propagation penetration within buildings. Measurements campaigns carried out at 2.2 and 3.5 GHz have been conducted to obtain the impulse responses of the channel using a MIMO channel sounder designed at IETR. The measurements are processed with an algorithm extracting the dominant paths. The architectures of the digital block are implemented on a Xilinx Virtex-IV FPGA (field programmable gate array). After the implementation of the impulse responses, the accuracy, the occupation on the FPGA and the latency of the architectures are analyzed
