Stress Testing Simulator for Wireless Networks

In this proof-of-concept project, we plan to develop a prototype of stress testing simulator for wireless networks, including wireless LAN, WiMAX, 3G cellular networks. The stress testing simulator will be used to evaluate the network performance when a tremendous number of users are trying to access the wireless infrastructure under extreme scenarios such as earthquakes, terrorism attacks, and major social events like soccer games. In these situations, the network traffic surges in a short time and leads to access congestion and to extended delay. The failure of a single base station may also cause ripple effects in blocking so as to reverberate throughout of the entire network.In public switched telephone networks (PSTN), stress testing with automatic call generator has been widely used. However, there is no similar instrument to test a base station in wireless networks, which is possibly due to the fact that a base station usually only covers several tens of users, while an end office in PSTN covers hundreds of users. With emerging technologies such as MIMO and OFDM, the capacity of wireless networks has increased significantly, and thus will be able to accommodate more and more users. Consequently, there is a need to develop a validation tool for stress testing in wireless networks, which is the goal of this project.The simulator consists of three parts: a set of RF modules to generate radio signals, one high-end digital signal processor for control and management, and an Ethernet adapter for remote control through the Internet. As to the software part, a GUI will be developed for system configuration, testing, and data analysis. The proposed simulator can generate traffic from hundreds of users with different behaviors. Various channel models will be also incorporated into the system to simulate the path loss and fading effect in realistic scenario.