Models of Hybrid Wireless Networks with Realistic Workloads

More and more the integration of WiFi and WiMaX wireless networks seem to be the favorite metropolitan area networking option for the future. Some authors refer to these as hybrid wireless networks (HWN). Call admission control in HWN, the efficiency of routing protocols and so on, depend on the QoS or performance of the network. In order to predict the performance of these networks one needs to build a prototype or model them. Simulation models are clearly an option, but simulations become complex, are hard to validate and require much processor time when the network becomes large. In this paper we advocate a hierarchy of models build upon an analytic multiclass queueing network model. We show the results of comparing such a network with simulations of the same network and using inter arrival time and packet distributions of measured Internet traffic. While trends are the same between the simulation and analytic model results, the absolute values are not.