The genesis for this book was my involvement with the development of the
SystemView (now SystemVue) simulation program at Elanix, Inc. Over several
years of development, technical support, and seminars, several issues kept recur-
ring. One common question was, “How do you simulate (such and such)?” The sec-
ond set of issues was based on modern communication systems, and why particular
developers did what they did. This book is an attempt to gather these issues into a
single comprehensive source.
In general there are three different techniques for performance evaluation of
systems and networks: mathematical analysis, measurements, and computer
simulation. All these techniques have their strength and weaknesses. In the
literature there are plenty of discussions about when to use which technique,
how to apply it, and which pitfalls are related to which evaluation technique.
This paper covers the keynote address delivered by the
Chairman of the COST Action 285 at the Symposium. It outlines the
studies undertaken by the members of the Action with the objective of
enhancing existing modeling and simulation tools and to develop new ones
for research in emerging multiservice telecommunication networks. The
paper shows how the scope of COST Action 285 has been enriched by the
contributions made at the Symposium.
Since the first edition of the book was published, the field of modeling and simulation of
communication systems has grown and matured in many ways, and the use of simulation as a
day-to-day tool is now even more common practice. Many new modeling and simulation
approaches have been developed in the recent years, many more commercial simulation
packages are available, and the evolution of powerful general mathematical applications
packages has provided still more options for computer-aided design and analysis. With the
current interest in digital mobile communications, a primary area of application of modeling
and simulation is now to wireless systems of a different flavor than the traditional ones.
simulation is experimentation with models. For system design, research, and edu-
cation, simulations must not only construct and modify many different models but
also store and access a large volume of results. That is practical only with models
programmed on computers [1,2]