Outage probability for GPRS over GSM voice services

The General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is designed for transmitting packet data and supposed to take its radio resource from the pool of channels unused by GSM voice services. Obviously, the introduction of GPRS affects on the voice services. In this paper, the outage probability of non-frequency hopping and frequency hopping systems with different frequency reuse factor has been calculated in order to investigate those effects. The number of unused voice channels allocated to GPRS depends on the difference between the outage level of the existing GSM network and the maximum acceptable level. For both non-frequency hopping and frequency hopping systems, GPRS affects the QoS of voice services of the network with small reuse factor are higher than that of the network with large reuse factor. GPRS will reduce the cell service area, but the reduction percentage of the cell service area for the system with a small reuse factor is higher than that for the system with a large reuse factor.