A simulation environment for GPRS traffic in an advanced travellers information system (ATIS)

General Packet Radio Service (GPRS)—a bearer service to GSM—has been deployed worldwide, and is widely considered a technology precursor to the evolving third generation (3G) wireless networks. The general conception has been that while users will be exposed to faster wide-area wireless data access, experience gained from GPRS could well prove useful for 3G, and also for systems beyond 3G deployment. In this paper, we present a comprehensive simulation study for different traffic scheduling algorithms for Quality of Service (QoS) in GPRS at the IP level. We first study the correlation between GSM and GPRS users, and show how a dynamic channel allocation scheme between GSM–GPRS can give substantially better performance than the static ones. We then extend our study by taking into account users requirements for different QoS profiles, based on seven different scheduling algorithms in GPRS. By simulating traffic related to an ATIS (Advanced Travellers Information System) at the IP level, we show how traffic scheduling algorithms perform by taking into account different performance parameters such as the average traffic, average waiting time in the scheduler, packet loss probabilities in the scheduler based on static and dynamic channel allocation schemes, packet priorities as well as average throughput per-GPRS user. The study gives a comparative analysis for various scheduling 1569-190X/$ see front matter 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.simpat.2004.04.004 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (A. Pescapè), [email protected] (G. Ventre). 2 A. Pescapè, G. Ventre / Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory xxx (2004) xxx–xxx ARTICLE IN PRESS algorithms—network designers can benefit from this study, and by extending this to several other scenarios. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.