Towards Integrated PSEs for Wireless Communications: Experiences with the S W and SitePlanner

This paper describes the computational methodologies of two problem solving environments (PSEs) for wireless network design and analysis, one academic (S W) and one commercial (SitePlanner R ). The PSEs address differently common computational issues such as environment specification, propagation modeling, channel performance prediction, system design optimization, and data management. The intended uses, interfaces, and capabilities of the two PSEs are compared and contrasted in a common framework. An important future direction, for these two and all future wireless system design PSEs, is resolving the fundamental impedance mismatch between physical channel modeling and upper level protocol modeling in wireless networks.