Designing and Implementing an IEEE 802.16 Network Simulator for Performance Evaluation of Bandwidth Allocation Algorithms

IEEE 802.16 technology is a promising technology to solve the last mile problem by its wireless, long distance, and high-bandwidth transmission. However, there isn\´t any suitable simulator to evaluate the performance between different IEEE 802.16 bandwidth allocation algorithms. In this paper, an IEEE 802.16 network simulator, Light WiMAX simulator (LWX), is proposed to provide flexible and robust functionalities for evaluating varies IEEE 802.16 bandwidth allocation algorithms. The contributions of LWX are (1) to support QoS, OFDMA, and multi-hop relay, (2) to provide a dynamic binding mechanism for the users to "plug-and-play" different algorithms without modifying and recompiling LWX, and (3) to supply the complete sample source codes and rich simulation scripts to let the users easily and quickly understand the architecture of LWX and integrate their works into LWX. Thus, it can benefit academic researchers and industrial developers to verify their designed algorithms and mechanisms.