a flow-level simulation framework for hsdpa-enabled umts networks
The High Speed Downlink Packet Access is designed for the efficient transport of best-effort traffic in UMTS networks. HSDPA uses fast scheduling with adaptive modulation and coding for the rapid adaptation of the instantaneous channel bandwidth to the channel quality. A simulator for such a system has to model these mechanism properly, which is classically done with help of link-level simulations. Additionally, traffic-dynamics on flow-level and radio resource management have a significant influence on the system performance, but a statistical sound evaluation requires long simulation runs, which prohibits an exact simulation on a small time-scale. Our contribution is a novel flow-level simulation framework, which captures on the one hand the impact of the physical layer, and enables on the other hand the efficient simulation of large scenarios over a long time. The framework uses analytical methods to calculate user bandwidths for different scheduling types and propagation environments as well as the required transmit powers and code resources for arbitrary radio resource management schemes.
flow-level simulation hsdpa umts simulation technique