Cost/benefit analysis of interval jumping in power-control simulation

Computation of power control calculations is one of the most time-consuming aspects of simulating wireless communication systems. These calculations are critical to understanding how a wireless network will perform, and so cannot be conveniently ignored. Power control calculations implement solutions to discretized differential equations, and so are essentially time stepped. In a previous paper (Perrone and Nicol, 1998) we proposed a technique for interval jumping, that allows for substantially many time steps to be jumped over, thereby reducing the amount of computation needed to achieve the same state as would straightforward time stepping. The technique involves identification of a region of simulation time during which no channel assignments change due to limits on transmitter power, and a jump over that region. We examine the cost/benefit tradeoffs between policies which seek to minimize the work done to identify a jump interval, and the cost of computing those policies. We find that a tiered dynamic programming approach yields policies that very nearly minimize the searching overhead, while enjoying substantively lower computation costs than does the policy which strictly minimizes the searching overhead