SIMULATION METHODOLOGY FOR ASSESSING MXRAN ARCHITECTURE PERFORMANCE

: Product life cycles in communications and other technology related industries are getting shorter and shorter. Consequently the performance of such systems must be evaluated early in the architecture design stage. In the wireless networks area new radio access technologies are applied and form a multistandard radio access network (MxRAN) which denotes an evolution of the current UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) architecture defined by standards bodies. The MxRAN is a main part of the IPonAir [IPonAir homepage] project. For this project several network architecture options and protocol stacks must be assessed. This makes the availability of an easy to use performance evaluation tool indispensable. In this paper the requirements and the modeling concept of a flexible signaling performance model are depicted. Thereby a use case approach starting with a description in Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) is applied. This set of MSCs is then converted automatically to a generic model that can be executed in an event driven environment.