The Use of NS-2 Simulator in Studying UMTS Performances

Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) is a third-generation mobile communications system that supports high bit rate wireless multimedia applications. In addition to UMTS, HSDPA-based UMTS networks improve the initial UMTS networks in terms of radio resource allocation and data transfer performances. Due to the complexity of such system and difficulty of access to the real system, it is very important to have a reliable simulation tool for performance evaluation and development of new solutions. In this paper, a module for end-to-end UMTS HSDPA-based simulation for QoS evaluation is used. The Enhanced UMTS Radio Access Network Extensions (EURANE) provided UMTS and HSDPA support in the Network Simulator (NS-2). The simulator can evaluate parameters associated with Enhanced UMTS performance (end-to-end delay, jitter, throughput) to assess the impact of new protocols and architectures. Performance evaluation conducted in this paper captures the performance of the air interface for mobile users moving through different environments.