The paper deals with the design of Rayleigh fading channel simulators based on the inner–outer factorization. The core of the approach is to approximate the outer spectral factor of the channel power spectral density (PSD) by either finite-order polynomials or rational functions. This, respectively, leads to MA or AR/ARMA models. The parameter estimation operates in two steps: the outer factor, which leads to a minimum-phase filter, is first evaluated inside the unit disk of the z-plane. Then, we propose to compute the Taylor expansion coefficients of the outer factor because they coincide with the model parameters. Unlike other simulation techniques, this has the advantage that the first p parameters remain unchanged when one increases the model order from p to p+1. A comparative study with existing channel simulation approaches points out the relevance of our ARMA model-based method. Moreover, the ARMA model weakens the oscillatory deviations from the theoretical PSD in the case of AR models, or low peaks at the Doppler frequencies for MA models.