Wireless simulation and self-organizing spectrum management

Wireless service providers are continually looking for new features and products to improve quality of service, increase system capacity, and reduce administrative overhead. The simulation tool W provides a flexible platform for the exploration of a broad range of system-level design and performance issues in wireless networks. Investigation of network issues using W gives Lucent Technologies the ability to design new features and products more effectively by reducing development intervals and implementing a one-pass design on field-quality products. We describe the scope of the simulation platform and illustrate the specific use of the W tool for examination of a next-generation channel assignment algorithm currently under development. The algorithm's adaptive nature provides automatic configuration at system initialization, as well as adaptation to system expansion and traffic patterns with spatial or temporal variations, thus ensuring ease of operation for service providers. Initial simulation experiments confirm its self-organizing capability and suggest a significant improvement in quality of service in terms of call blocking and dropping.