Capacity Evaluation of Resource Allocation Strategies in the GPRS System

A fundamental issue in GSM/GPRS networks planning is the choice of an appropriate resource allocation strategy at MAC layer to allow data and voice users to share the common transport media. Our goal is to quantitatively evaluate the convenience, in terms of efficient radio resources utilization, of reserving a few timeslots in each TDMA frame to GPRS traffic rather than adopting a “complete-sharing” strategy. Consequently, a single-carrier GPRS system scenario has been accurately modeled under realistic working conditions, including physical layer errors, RLC blocks retransmissions and MAC allocation procedures.