Simulation of On-The-Move Communications: Issues and Answers

摘要

Most of the protocols supporting mobile communications systems that have been deployed in the commercial world depend on there being a network of static base stations, linked to a trunk line, such that the user's radio node is always one wireless hop away from a base station. However, in military communications systems, and in some commercial applications, everything can be dynamic - there will not be a base station within one wireless hop of every user. Thus, an important arena of wireless communications applications is evolving to a new kind of network in which trunking will be done through subnets consisting of strings of user's nodes linked together on an ad hoc basis. As the nodes move and some trunk links break, this ad hoc network will re-configure itself and another subnet will be formed to move the trunk traffic. The complexity of these new on-the-move (OTM) networks presents new challenges for modeling and simulation. We explore issues associated with OTM networks in the context of evolving military network requirements. We describe a modeling and analysis approach that modularizes the simulation problem into two layers: the traffic layer and the network management layer. A given traffic scenario generates traffic that is presented to each of the candidate network managers and their performances are compared. This is done for several scenarios that span various dimensions of possible traffic and for each proposed network design solution. The result of this process is a comparative evaluation over the full range of relevant scenarios, which provides the data foundation needed to select the best design approach.