SGER: Exploratory Research: Interactive Visualization and Control of Mobile Network Simulations

University Of North Carolina At Charlotte, Charlotte NC

Investigators

Abstract

The objective of this research is to explore information visualization schemes to interactively control, drive and analyze simulations of adaptive resource management protocols in mobile networks. The considerable number of system variables and metrics that characterize adaptive resource management protocols and the need to monitor them in real-time results in a data explosion, necessitating data visualization schemes for efficient analysis and optimization. Two ideas will be explored: 1. Interactively steer simulations to optimize multi-layer adaptive protocols, via visualization interactions of appropriate simulation variables (system monitoring metrics, metric paramaters and simulation system parameters). 2. Characterize and segment simulations in terms of their critical features (e.g., congestion, failure) under a variety of dynamic network conditions. Objective 1 is aimed at making the user central to the simulation environment, allowing simulations to be conrolled (stopped, backed up, variables/protocols changed) and directed towards certain predefined objectives. Dynamic visualizations of system variables and interactions among them are fundamental to this interactive exploration, and more important, the user's intuition and domain expertise helps explore (reduce) a large search space of these variables. Objective 2 is targeted at characterizing simulations by focusing on critical features of a simulaltion, such as normal, congestion, transient and steady state failure, and recovery conditions. A robust scheme to detect and track these features will permit large amounts of simulation data to be compactly represented, stored and searched. The goal is to evaluate the application of this approach to automating adaptive protocol design and optimization. The two proposed ideas will be evaluated for a specific problem instance that is being addressed by an ongoing NSF project on survivable wireless access networks. The problem is to develop a scaleable resource management scheme that integrates the use of adaptive admission control and adaptive multiple access control within hierarchical cellsite architectures of mobile networks. This multi-layer analysis and optimization problem presents a hugh search space of simulation scenarios, posing significant challenges to any type of comparative or systematic study. Earlier work has largely been restricted to individual components of such problems, at best. The approach is to cast this as a multi-variate data analysis problem, and explore several interactive multi-variate visualization methods. This should help in understanding the complex spatial and temporal relationships among the search space variables. Interactive steering is an efficient means to exploring this space and lead to desired objectives, while abstracting simulations by extracting and parameterizing critical features serves to facilitate automated evaluation of batch siumlation runs or network monitoring. Support by an SGER is being requested for two reasons. (1) The proposed application of information visualization to the mobile networking domain has not previously been attempted. The proposed work shows great promise to dramatically change/improve current approaches to development and simulation-based analysis of adaptive protocols. However, this work requires experimentation with new ideas in emerging research areas (interactive steering and feature characterization), and specific outcomes are not guaranteed. (2) Immediate support is needed since the proposed work is to be conducted in conjucntion with a newly-funded NSF project. It is expected that this will greatly enhance the progress achieved within both projects.