Impact of the cell update mechanism in GPRS

Cellular packet systems such as GPRS rely on cell update (CU)/routing area update (RAU) mechanisms to provide continuous connectivity within the service area. This paper is aimed to evaluate the impact that these mechanisms have on system performance. We show that the CU/RAU procedure could cause the loss of user data packets that, in case of reliable data services, can increase the amount of retransmission signaling to cope with such packet losses. In any case, it should be useful to characterize the amount of user data traffic affected in order to take into account this effect when QoS criteria are pursued.