JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Multi agent system (MAS) is considered an effective way to design, analyze and implement complex systems in various disciplines nowadays. However, MAS has not been sufficiently applied in mainstream modelling of wireless communication networks yet. The exponential growth of network users has led today’s communication networks even more significantly complex. As such, modelling and simulation tends to grow in proportion but not markedly to meet the preciseness and complexity of the system under consideration. Furthermore, the future mobile communication seems to incline over self-adaptive resource allocation and congestion control mechanisms. This aims to relieve the workload of the network operator while maintaining the QoS level of the communication intact. The advancements also envision the autonomous nature of future wireless communication technologies where dynamic resource allocation will play a vital role in efficient bandwidth utilization, throughput maximization and effective power control mechanisms. In this context, MAS brings about various possibilities to model and simulate environments which are typically stochastic in nature and tends to grow in a decentralized manner. MAS based simulation is such a simulation method which has gained recognition in modeling telecommunication systems where issues like network complexity, traffic and network management are prevalent. MAS has its proven standing to represent a real interactive environment of a system where learning, negotiation and cooperation are important phenomena. On that account, MAS has already started to establish its turf in the wireless communication systems as well. As a matter of fact, the existing network simulators are not designed to incorporate the features that MAS has to offer. So, the agent based simulation toolkits are used alongside, on top of which most of the physical environment aspects can be modeled that are usually neglected by the existing network simulators. This thesis investigates the areas of wireless communications where multi agent systems and simulators are applicable by the means of literature study and presents simple simulation models constructed in Netlogo, a multi agent based simulation toolkit. As a result, the applicability of MAS simulators in areas like radio channel environment, resource allocation, routing, medium access control and cognitive radio is presented. At the end, conclusions are drawn about feasibility of using MAS simulators to simulate wireless communication networks.