Overview and capacity of the GPRS (General Packet Radio Service)

An evaluation of the capacity of the GPRS, as a packet-switched access mode for the GSM system, is studied. The work has been done assuming an air interface proposed in an ETSI draft document and taking two traffic models also standardised by this institution. Statistical multiplexing allows several users to share radio channels increasing the capacity of the system. Thus, the results obtained are: throughput and access delay depending on the number of subscribers each of them with an identical activity factor. We have also studied the 95th percentile of access delay and delay distributions in order to assure the QoS of the system.