Service scheduling for general packet radio service classes

While the quality of service (QoS) profiles for a number of general packet radio service (GPRS) classes has been specified by ETSI, how QoS management is provided by means of traffic scheduling, traffic shaping, and connection admission control, in a GPRS network is an implementation issue that is attracting significant current research interest. This paper presents an evaluation of several traffic scheduling methods, including of FIFO, static priority scheduling (SPS) and earliest deadline first (EDF) by simulations, with the objective of meeting the delay profiles defined for a number of GPRS classes. Traffic sources representative of GPRS applications, including e-mail, fleet management and World Wide Web applications are employed. We focus on the forward link which represents the bottleneck of a typical GPRS data connection. Results show that EDF is able to meet the delay requirements at a much higher channel utilization compared to the other alternatives.