Performance evaluation of GSM/GPRS networks with channel re-allocation scheme

Previous work studying the channel allocation schemes in GSM/GPRS network commonly assume that one or two channels are required by a GPRS data for the sake of analytical simplicity. In this letter, we remove the assumption and generalize the GPRS data channel requirement (M channels). Additionally, we propose a channel re-allocation scheme (RAS), executed upon the channel release, by re-allocating the idle channels to the GPRS data which is currently using less than M channels. The example findings show that RAS can significantly decrease the voice call blocking probability and GPRS packet transmission time with slight channel utilization increase and negligible expense on GPRS packet blocking probability. Small M (e.g.M=2) will underestimate the performance achievements of the prior channel allocation scheme as well as RAS.