GPRS network planning on the existing GSM system

The principles of GPRS network planning on top of the existing GSM system have been outlined. In order not to damage the GSM voice services the remaining capacity of an existing network must be correctly evaluated. The maximum radio resources enabled to be allocated to GPRS are defined by the network remaining capacity and are dependent on the outage or interference level of the existing network. It needs to consider that the outage probability near to the cell border area will increase and the real served area of a cell may be reduced due to the introduction of GPRS. That implies that GPRS may cause a higher handover dropping rate to GSM voice services. GPRS capacity performance in the downlink is quite different from that in uplink because of the difference in transmission protocols. The GPRS transmission efficiency is highly affected by the packet sizes of the data traffic. The multi-slot allocation does not show a gain in the mean throughput neither a decrease in the mean delay. This result is different from the result of the uplink performance presented by Jian Cai and Goodman (see IEEE Commun. Magazine, p.122-28, 1997). Since the multi-slot allocation largely increases the delay of the single-slot service, a control of the multi-slot services is needed.