Generic wireless network system modeler: Fostering the analysis of complex LTE deployments

Abstract

Despite the huge research effort in the field of LTE networks, there is not a widely accepted methodology to conduct the corresponding analysis. Various approaches and tools are used, each of them having several advantages, but showing some drawbacks as well. One of the most limiting aspects is that they are not usually able to cope with network deployments having a large number of elements, as it would be in dense Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets). In other cases, they do not usually pay too much attention to the requirements that different types of services might have, overusing the so-called full-buffer approach. In this paper we introduce the Generic Wireless Network System Modeler (GWNSyM), a flexible framework that allows the deployment of rather complex networks, which can be exploited to analyze a wide range of resource management techniques, solutions and, even, novel architectural approaches. The tool is validated over a high-dense network deployment, embracing different types of cells, users and services. Over such scenario, we assess the performance of CoMP techniques and we leverage the Network Virtualization Function paradigm.