Effect of high GSM voice traffic on GPRS data network and the proposed solutions

GPRS uses the same radio resources of the GSM network. Therefore, co-planning of both GSM and GPRS network is an imminent issue for GSM network operators. GPRS users send their packets on the idle timeslots that are unused by the voice traffic. Although voice users have a higher priority than data users, satisfying data users is very important when it comes to the operating network revenue. In this paper, the correlation between the served load (both voice and data traffic), the required QoS and the available radio resources is studied. We propose different solutions when high data traffic co-exists with high voice traffic. A new software tool, GPRS Network Design (GND) is developed to give the designer those solutions and the effect of each one on system design.