Introduction:

A decade ago, Wireless communicaion mainly concentrated on voice and low bandwidth data rate applications. But the usage of Internet led to attempts in converging these two areas. Internet medium generally requires a large bandwidth of hight data rate applications and an error free transmission. But scarcity of bandwidth and fading introduced high errors, calling for the need of efficient techniques to provide high data rate application.

 

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) that converts the frequency selective channel into narrow-band flat fading channels is considered to be one of the better solutions. This advantage along with the advancement in VLSI tehcnology made broadband a possible system. 

 

This influenced in the formation of an IEEE committee and the result is a standard based on OFDM called IEEE802.16, which initially concentrated on stationery users (IEEE802.16d) and then moved to include mobile application (IEEE802.16e) and now to an enhanced broadband mobile applications ( IEEE802.16m).

 

Another International Standard developing organisation called the Third generation partnership project (3GPP) is also in the proces of defining the Long Term Evolution (LTE) for 3G radio access. The main targets of this evolution concern increased data rates, improved spectrum efficiency, improved coverage and reduced latency. This is also an OFDM based technology.

 

Due to emergence of multiple standards it is necessary to have a common platform to understand the performance and to compare various standards. This will be helpfull for the operator to decide on the standards to adopt for their service, and to the vendors in their product development. This is the inspiration for the development of Broadband Wireless Simulator (BWSim).  

 

BWSim: 

Broadband Wireless Simulator (BWSim) is a OFDM technology based wireless simulator. It currently supports IEEE802.16e and 3GPP-LTE based system and link simulation. It may also implement any of the potential standards based on OFDM technology that emerge in future.

 

The current version of simulator concentrates maily on the physical layer aspects, and some of the MAC related issues. It enables the study of the system performance under realistic-like situations. The simulator allows user to simulate an OFDM based system in the multi-cellular environment under different channel conditions, in the presence of interference. The simulator was written in a plug-n-play fashion which ensures the reusability of the different common blocks between IEEE802.16e and LTE. It outputs different performance indicators like BER, FER, throughput, SINR distribution etc.

 

Features:

Currently BWSim supports IEEE802.16e and LTE standards based system simulations with both Up-link and Down-link support. It could be run in both system level and link level simulation modes. It requires few parameters to be configured to set up the simulation environment and modes. The parameters like cell architecture, antenna configurations, channel models, transmitter and reciver parameters with simulation duration have to be set.

Present version has a simple menu based user interface to provide all these inputs to the simulator. Currently a minimal set of relevant parameters are alone provided for use and the extensive other configurations can be included on demand. Documents are provided to help user understand the features of the BSWim, its installation and usage.

 

Documents:

bwsim_overall_v1.0   - To know about BWSim and it's features in detail.

bwsim_instal_v1.0  - Installation procedures for seting up the environment for BWSim run is elaborated here.

bwsim_userifc_v1.0    - To ease the use of BWSim package, user interface is explained in detail here.

 

Download: 

Currently BWSim IEEE802.16e version is availble for download. The release version is bwsim_wimax_1.0.0 .