Simulation and Performance Evaluation of a Public Safety Wireless Network: Case Study

In this article, the authors describe simulation and performance evaluation of a deployed radio communication network operated by a public safety agency. The network consists of a central site and multiple cells.Each cell has a finite number of available radio channels.The network is circuit-switched. Hence, the system utilization is a time and space distribution of the number of concurrent calls. To determine the traffic load variations, the authors analyze activity data from sample weeks in 2002 and 2003. They simulate the network by using the OPNET simulation tool and a newly developed network simulator named WarnSim. Simulation models are based on the collected activity data and are used to evaluate the utilization of system resources and to locate network bottlenecks.