A System Level Simulation Platform for the Study of
QoS Provisioning in UMTS/WLAN Interworking
Changliang Wang, Weiwei Xia, Lianfeng Shen, Song Tiecheng
National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory
Southeast University
Nanjing, China
{wchliang, wwxia, lfshen, songtc}@seu.edu.cn
Abstract—IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN)
provides data-intensive access to complement the existing
Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS). However,
few literatures focus on the simulation platform integrating
UMTS and WLAN. This paper uses OPNET™ to implement a
system level simulation platform to allow researchers to study the
quality of service (QoS) provisioning issues in UMTS/WLAN
interworking. The platform handles different classes of service
defined for UMTS, also allows for the study of user mobility, as
well as radio resource management (RRM) schemes such as
handoffs and call admission control (CAC). This paper mainly
presents the architecture of the simulation platform and the
realization of UW_AP and UWE node models, and then proposes
a CAC scheme based on velocity and service type. The
performance of the proposed scheme is proven better than
WLAN-First scheme through simulation in the platform.
Keywords-simulation platform; UMTS/WLAN interworking;
CAC; QoS
I. INTRODUCTION
Driven by the service anywhere and anytime concept, it is
well accepted that next generation wireless networks will be
heterogeneous, integrating different networks in order to
provide all types of service for mobile users with multimode
access capability. The Universal Mobile Telecommunications
System (UMTS) provides only limited data rate up to 2 Mbps,
and doesn’t satisfy data-intensive applications and the cost is
high. However, it can be integrated with other networks such as
Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). As two typical
wireless networks, the integration of UMTS and WLAN is
potential from the perspectives of coverage fields, data rate,
service, and mobility support [1].
Currently, there exist few literatures about the realization of
simulation platform for UMTS/WLAN system. In [2], the
implementation of platform was illustrated in detail, but the
standard models weren’t used, instead they defined new
models simplifying the standards and protocols. We aim to
realize the realistic UMTS/WLAN interworking scenario to
study the QoS (quality of service) provisioning issues deeply
and accurately. Our platform strictly complies with the UMTS
and WLAN standards, and allows for multiple classes of
service and the study of radio resource management (RRM)
schemes such as call admission control (CAC) algorithms.
When a call arrives, the system has to determine whether to
accept the call or not. These admission decisions are performed
by CAC. CAC belongs to the resource management category
and is widely being investigated in many other researches [3-
5]. Traditionally, researches on CAC have mostly focused on
channel allocation. However, in this paper, we propose a CAC
scheme based on velocity and service to enhance the QoS
provisioning for WLAN coupled with UMTS cellular network
by jointly considering the link conditions, user mobility, traffic
type as well as network characteristics. In a hybrid
UMTS/WLAN system, vertical handoffs from the WLAN to
the UMTS and that from the UMTS to the WLAN have a great
importance [6]. So in our scheme, vertical handoff calls are
provided higher priority over new calls to reduce dropping
probability. We verify the proposed scheme through simulation
in the platform.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II presents the
methodology used and the design of the simulation model
based on OPNET™. Specifically, the dual-mode user
equipment node model (termed UWE) and the 3G-aware
WLAN Access Point (termed UW_AP) will be elaborated in
detail. Relative works as well as our proposed CAC algorithm
are presented in Section III. In Section IV, the simulation
results for the proposed CAC algorithm are presented. We give
our conclusion in Section V.
II.
IMPLEMENTATION OF THE SIMULATION PLATFORM
The simulation scenario is set as that there exist two
networks, UMTS and WLAN, and the dual-mode User
Equipment (UE) will exchange data with Internet servers,
while the UE is moving randomly, thus giving rise to vertical
handoff between the two networks. In this paper, the
simulation platform is designed in OPNET Modeler™ 10.5
using a top-down design approach. This simulation platform
effort leveraged the existing OPNET™ model libraries,
specifically the UMTS and the 802.11 WLAN model sets. This
section presents the simulation design at the network, node,
and process levels.
A. Network Architecture
Modeler™ uses a hierarchical structure of network
scenarios, nodes and processes. The top level of the simulation
platform is graphically depicted in Fig. 1. The network
This work is supported by the National High Technology Research and
Development Program of China (863 Program) (No. 2008AA01Z205), the
Cultivation Fund of the Key Scientific and Technical Innovation Project of the
Ministry of Education of China (No. 708046), and the Research Fund of
ational Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University
(No. 2008A08, 2008B05b).
The 1st International Conference on Information Science and Engineering (ICISE2009)
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