A System Level Simulation Platform for the Study of QoS Provisioning in UMTS/WLAN Interworking

IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) provides data-intensive access to complement the existing Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS). However, few literatures focus on the simulation platform integrating UMTS and WLAN. This paper uses OPNET™ to implement a system level simulation platform to allow researchers to study the quality of service (QoS) provisioning issues in UMTS/WLAN interworking. The platform handles different classes of service defined for UMTS, also allows for the study of user mobility, as well as radio resource management (RRM) schemes such as handoffs and call admission control (CAC). This paper mainly presents the architecture of the simulation platform and the realization of UW_AP and UWE node models, and then proposes a CAC scheme based on velocity and service type. The performance of the proposed scheme is proven better than WLAN-First scheme through simulation in the platform.