Cost/benefit analysis of interval jumping in power-control simulation

Computation of power control calculations is one of the most time-consuming aspects of simulating wireless communication systems. These calculations are critical to understanding how a wireless network will perform, and so cannot be conveniently ignored. Power-control calculations implement solutions to discretized differential equations, and so are essentially time-stepped. In a previous paper we proposed a technique for interval jumping, that allows for substantially many time-steps to be jumped over, thereby reducing the amount of computation needed to achieve the same state as would straightforward time-stepping. The technique involves identification of a region of simulation time during which no channel assignments change due to limits on transmitter power, and a `jump' over that region. In this paper we examine the cost/benefit tradeoffs between policies which seek to minimize the work done to identify a jump interval, and the cost of computing those policies. We find that a tiered dynamic programming approach yields policies that very nearly minimize the searching overhead, while enjoying substantively lower computation costs than does the policy which strictly minimizes the searching overhead.