A wireless network simulator based on design patterns for WiMAX and LTE

To study wireless network, a network simulator always is an important tool for researchers to evaluate their theories. If a selected simulator inherently has poor architecture, the maintenance, will become more difficult in the future. To increase the flexibility of a simulator's architecture, the use of design patterns as the norms of system architecture design is suggested in this paper. We propose a network simulator architecture, named as CCGns, which is a discrete-event virtual network simulator and follows the IEEE 802.16-2009 standard. The main contribution of CCGns is to propose five aspects: a scalable MAC messages management and processing architecture, an applicable for multi-hop relay network architecture, a two-stage minimum variance bandwidth allocation algorithm, a comparable compound factors-based common scheduler operating interface architecture, and an exchangeable frame structure architecture for WiMAX and LTE. In the aspect of expanding module function, we show the simulation results of using uniform, random, or round-robin scheduling to allocate bandwidth resource. We try to replace the WiMAX frame structure with LTE frame structure, and demonstrate the system performance of the relay network architecture for WiMAX and LTE protocol. We hope this study will benefit researchers who need to implement their network simulators.