Simulation of a Reconfigurable Heterogeneous Communication Environment

Abstract

In today‘s mobile communications arena the evolution of 3G technology and the market absorption of the existing 2/2.5G GSM technology have created a major challenge for the network operators, vendors, and equipment manufacturers. In one part of the world mainly Europe, work is being done to come up with a standard which is equally acceptable to all the major players in the 3G domain; take 3GPP, 3GPP I and 3GPP II for instance. While on the other hand GSM based cellular networks and services are still in the phase of deployment in many third world African and Asian countries. GSM remains the major standard being deployed and adopted throughout the world today. Our project mainly caters the above mentioned issue. We have worked on the modeling and simulation of an efficient solution to bridge the gap between the second and third generation of mobile communication. The project is based on simulation of an environment where a user terminal operates in multimode and has the capability to support both GSM and UMTS simultaneously. The multi-standard operation of the equipment is made possible because of its capability to reconfigure itself at runtime. Reconfigurability has been made possible because of the Software Defined Radio technology on which the terminal is based. In order to support the multiple standards (GSM and WCDMA in our case) the terminal is controlled and assigned necessary parameters through a common control node similar to NODE B/MSC in existent cellular network.