High Fidelity Simulation of Mobile Cellular Systems with Integrated Resource Allocation and Adaptive Antennas

Using parallel processing, the execution time of wireless network simulations can be significantly decreased without compromising the fidelity of the simulation. However, incorporating details such as signal propagation, interference, and resource allocation schemes may add considerable complexity to the parallel simulation which may overshadow the gain of parallelization. This paper reports on a recent work on parallelizing a high fidelity mobile wireless network simulator where dynamic resource allocation schemes are incorporated and the physical layer characteristics are included in sufficient detail. The program was run on a modular super-computing platform with 32 processors interconnected by high-speed infiniband links. Simulation results indicate that parallelization can significantly improve the runtime performance of the simulation without simplifying the physical layer modeling; a runtime speedup of more than 11 was achieved using 16 processors for a set of simulation parameters. A set of quantitative results on the capacity of the simulated network is obtained using the parallel simulator.