Enhanced GTP: an efficient packet tunneling protocol for General Packet Radio Service

General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is the packet data service for the phase 2+ of the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) and it is also included in the 3/sup rd/ generation partnership project (3GPP) which is one of the proposals for the 3/sup rd/ generation mobile communication systems (3G). GPRS defines packet-switched service based on GSM and Internet protocol (IP) core networks. It also provides a tunneling protocol called the GPRS tunneling protocol (GTP) by which packets in different protocols can be encapsulated and carried on the IP core network. However, GTP does not optimize packet encapsulation and introduces overhead in data transmission. In this paper, an enhanced GPRS tunneling protocol is thus elaborated. GTP uses a tunneling identifier to specify a tunnel, which belongs a mobile station. The enhanced protocol extends GTP signaling messages and uses a packet data protocol (PDP) address as a tunneling identifier so that the GTP in the data transmission plane can be eliminated. According to the experiments, the enhanced GTP reduces the tunneling overhead and improves the network throughput to a great extreme.