Strategies for Link-Level Performance Assessment in the Simulation of Wireless Systems

Performance assessment of wireless communication systems by computer simulations is a valuable and widely adopted tool for research and development, as well as in planning and deployment phases of these systems. It allows the numerical evaluation of a model of the wireless communication system of interest, while featuring speed, inexpensiveness, and flexibility to control the experiments. However, the high number of functionalities to be modeled in typical wireless setups makes a single simulator unfeasible. It is usual to break the system into modules, or layers, of reduced dimensionality. A simulation of the whole system can then be achieved by constructing all necessary modules and inter-connecting them via appropriate interfaces. This chapter describes a two-level organization of the system’s functionalities as the simulator is split into system- and link-level modules.