Design and performance modeling & simulation of self-healing mechanisms for wireless communication networks

Abstract

The use of wireless communications networks has gained phenomenal momentum both in the business and individual-user sectors. As a consequence of the increasing reliance of businesses on such networks, service disruption due to network facility failures can cause severe economic impact on the associated business. Hence service survivability-i.e., providing continued service in the midst of network failures becomes an important feature for network providers to incorporate within their network. In this work, we propose appropriate self-healing mechanisms that can be used by network providers/engineers to provide automatic service restoration (hence service survivability) in the event of network facility failures in the wireless networks of today. In particular, our contribution is as follows. We propose appropriate (cost-performance- and complexity-sensitive) self-healing mechanisms that can be used both in the currently deployed GSM-based and the rapidly emerging GPRS-based wireless networks to provide service survivability. We then perform modeling and simulation of portions of the proposed self-healing mechanisms and analyze the performance of the proposed self-healing mechanism in the core network portion of a GSM/GPRS-based system. Our simulations not only help to demonstrate the importance of simulation-based studies towards understanding, modeling and analyzing the performance of the proposed self healing mechanisms but also help provide useful insights into the potential of the proposed self-healing mechanisms.