An air interface solution for multi-rate general packet radio service for GSM/DCS

The current second generation cellular networks, such as GSM/DCS and US-TDMA, only provide circuit-switched data services. Rigidity and inefficiency of circuit-switched architecture for data traffic, limits the system capacity. On the other hand, advantages of packet-switching techniques (such as efficient channel utilisation) have encouraged research into its applicability to some existing personal communication systems such as general packet radio service (GPRS) for GSM/DCS. This paper proposes a flexible and efficient multi-slot reservation access protocol for the GPRS multiple access control (MAC) layer, operation while simultaneously preserving the GSM system structure. Numerical evaluations of the system performance for different traffic models are presented.