Quality of service management in GPRS networks

Abstract

In this paper the performance and capacity gain achievable with quality of service (QoS) management in packet switched radio networks based on the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) are examined. Both the functions defined in the GPRS specification for QoS support and implementation-specific strategies for subscriber- and application-based Connection Admission Control (CAC) and scheduling are introduced. Taking characteristic measures for a pure best-effort service as the basis the effect of these QoS functions on the throughput and delay is analyzed. To achieve this, simulation results of GPRS performance and system measures for different load situations are produced with the simulation tool GPRSim that models the realistic traffic behaviour of a GPRS network.