A virtual time simulator for studying QoS management functions in UTRAN

The issue of QoS management in the radio interface has not been widely studied and the effects of parameters and algorithms in the user and control plane on different bearer services in high traffic situation have been rarely addressed. This paper describes a virtual time simulator for studying and validating enhanced QoS management functions before their deployment throughout the UMTS radio access network (UTRAN). Several simulations have been run to look into the feasibility of such a tool, and one relevant case is discussed in this paper, where the effectiveness of radio resources utilisation and differentiation among bearer services in terms of call block ratio, throughput, queuing time, object transfer delay and served guaranteed bit rate (GB) traffic load is investigated. The simulation results show the proposed simulator to be an appropriate tool for analysing QoS management functions.