Link layer analysis of the General Packet Radio Service for GSM

The General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is one of the services being standardized by ETSI for GSM Phase 2+. This paper briefly presents the status of the GPRS standard giving special attention to the link control/medium access control (RLC/MAC) protocol layer. Subsequently, an analytical evaluation of the GPRS downlink performance is presented. Faced with the increased use of Internet services, the downlink performance is an important metric as users-especially mobile users-will use the Internet mainly for consuming information, i.e. produce downlink traffic load.