Rutgers University
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
M.S. Thesis Abstract

by

Kinjal Desai

The FCC has been allocating sections of the radio spectrum as unlicensed bands over the period of last decade with the motivation of promoting diversity and novelty of wireless systems, services and technologies. The most recent in this series is the Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (U-NII), a 300 MHz of radio spectrum at 5 GHz, providing promising avenues for modern multimedia applications in 3G systems and beyond. No license is required to operate in the unlicensed band, though there could be some minimal rules that the systems need to conform to. Due to the significant cost involved in bandwidth acquisition through licensing, the unlicensed bands provide an attractive alternative to service providers in terms of time and cost of development and deployment. This latitude, however comes at the price of enhanced mutual interference because now there are multiple wireless systems, autonomous and non-cooperating, competing for common media resources. WINLAB proposes the novel concept of simulating ‘tournaments’ between these competing systems as a way of looking at this problem from the simulation and modeling angle.

This thesis describes the Tournament Arena Simulator (TAS), a simulation environment, developed for staging these tournaments between different autonomous wireless systems. The TAS involves modules for radio channel, mobility, geography and the mobile station transceiver to accurately portray all aspects of the real unlicensed band scenario. The transceiver module has the added capability of reconfigurability and dynamic class loading. This endows the TAS with the facility to dynamically reconfigure or rewrite the transceiver module in order to implement different autonomous systems and then make them compete with each other simultaneously. The fundamental system level assumption is that the environment supports only synchronous DS-CDMA systems in a mobile ad-hoc network scenario with point-to-point connections. The implementation is done in the Java binding of the Scalable Simulation Framework (SSF), a new public domain discrete event simulator. The thesis also goes on to demonstrate the utility and the operability of the TAS through performance evaluation of several standard systems and staging of sample tournaments between specific systems of interest.

Thesis Director: Professor Roy Yates

January, 2005

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