Real-time emulation of RRM strategies for UMTS bearer services

This paper describes the implementation and the achieved capabilities of a real-time UMTS demonstrator developed within the framework of the IST ARROWS (advanced radio resource management on wireless services) project. Among the main goals of the ARROWS demonstrator are the evaluation of radio resource management (RRM) strategies in a UMTS network and the analysis of the impact that these strategies have on the end-to-end behaviour of multimedia applications with quality of service (QoS) requirements. The demonstrator platform is built over a network of personal computers and copes with the real-time restrictions imposed by the emulation of UMTS transport bearers. After providing a brief description of the developed HW/SW platform, the different approaches taken to emulate the main functions included in the test-bed are described, together with some of the achieved capabilities in terms of implemented RRM algorithms, supported scenarios, lower layer emulation and included services and applications with QoS requirements.