Channel allocation for GPRS

Based on the GSM radio architecture, the general packet radio service (GPRS) provides users data connections with variable data rates and high bandwidth efficiency. In the GPRS service, allocation of physical channels is flexible, i.e., multiple channels can be allocated to a user. We propose four algorithms for the GPRS radio resource allocation: fixed resource allocation (FRA), dynamic resource allocation (DRA), fixed resource allocation with queue capability (FRAQ), and dynamic resource allocation with queue capability (DRAQ). We develop analytic and simulation models to evaluate the performance for these resource allocation algorithms in terms of the acceptance rate of both GPRS packet data and GSM voice calls. Our study indicates that DRAQ (queuing for both new and handoff calls) outperforms other algorithms.