Efficient massively parallel simulation of dynamic channel assignment schemes for wireless cellular communications

Fast, efficient parallel algorithms are presented for discrete event simulations of dynamic channel assignment schemes for wireless cellular communication networks. The driving events are called arrivals and departures, in continuous time, to cells geographically distributed across the service area. A dynamic channel assignment scheme decides which call arrivals to accept, and which channels to allocate to the accepted calls, attempting to minimize call blocking while ensuring co-channel interference is tolerably low. Specifically, the scheme ensures that the same channel is used concurrently at different cells only if the pairwise distances between those cells are sufficiently large. Much of the complexity of the system comes from ensuring this separation.

The network is modeled as a system of interacting continuous time automata, each corresponding to a cell. To simulate the model, we use conservative methods; i.e., methods in which no errors occur in the course of the simulation and so no rollback or relaxation is needed. Implemented on a 16K processor MasPar MP-1, an elegant and simple technique provides speedups of about 15x over an optimized serial simulation running on a high speed workstation. A drawback of this technique, typical of conservative methods, is that processor utilization is rather low. To overcome this, we developed new methods that exploit slackness in event dependencies over short intervals of time, thereby raising the utilization to above 50% and the speedup over the optimized serial code to about 120x with respect to the workstation simulation.