Simulation analysis of RLC/MAC for UMTS in Network Simulator version 2

Abstract: The Internet has mainly been interconnecting stationary computers by wired links, but an increasing number of mobile clients require wireless communication. One way to connect these clients is to use the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System, UMTS. UMTS is a third generation mobile system. A network can be seen as nodes interconnected by links. The functionality of the nodes can be described as a layered hierarchy. A reference model for this hierarchy was developed by OSI. In this model the second lowest layer is called data link layer. The data link layer is responsible for making the raw transmission appear error free to upper layers. The focus for this thesis is the data link layer in the UMTS. Compared to the data link layer in a wired scenario it contains more control and error correction mechanisms. These mechanisms use a lot of timers and triggers, which makes it very difficult to analyze them mathematically. Therefore simulation is the preferred method. For the simulations the network simulator version 2 was used. This is an open source discrete event simulator. It has a modularized wireless stack already implemented. This can not be used to simulate UMTS though. Some modules in this stack were replaced by a new implementation to make simulations on UMTS possible. Tests were performed on the new implementation and the results were what could be expected. The results were also consistent with previous research in the area.