Overview and Capacity of The GPRS (General Packet Radio Service)
Overview and Capacity of The GPRS (General Packet Radio Service)
Overview and Capacity of The GPRS (General Packet Radio Service)
1
The Spanish government in the CICYT project TIC97-0942 has funded this study.
offered range from a simple mobile internet access to a remote resources for GPRS as long as no other higher-priority GSM
telematics service. The possibilities are great if statistical services require them.
multiplexing between the sources can apply.
One of the purposes of the present work is to study the
One of the advantages of the packet-switching technique is thresholds where to enable/disable channels depending on the
charging. Whereas in circuit-switching a call is charged using number of active users and its traffic profile.
a time-oriented criteria, in packet-switching the charge can be
applied depending on the amount of data transmitted. This C. Physical Channels
fact can be really interesting for users that need to be in touch
for long but transmitting little amount of data. The physical channel dedicated to GPRS traffic is called a
Packet Data Channel (PDCH). At least one PDCH, acting as a
Another important factor is the Quality of Service (QoS) master, accommodates Packet Common Control Channels
offered by these services. The QoS can be negotiated when (PCCCHs) that carry all the control signalling necessary for
starting the session and can be renegotiated if it is required. initiating packet transfer, and Packet Traffic Channels
The QoS agreed between the user and the network can be (PTCH) which carry user data and dedicated signalling. This
used to charge the service. is called the Master Packet Data Channel (MPDCH).
III. GPRS Other PDCHs, acting as slaves, may only carry PTCHs, that is
to say, user data and dedicated signalling. This is called the
A. Introduction Slave Packet Data Channel (SPDCH).
The work on the GPRS specification began in 1994 while the D. Logical Channels and air interface
standard is expected to be published at the end of 1997 or at
the beginning of 1998. During this period the ETSI has The logical channels, which can be mapped on a PDCH
produced some draft documents in order to fulfil the GPRS (Packet Data Channels), are (see figure 1):
specification. In this work we have assumed the air interface Packet Common Control Channels (PCCCHs)
protocol presented in [1], which was proposed in September Packet Random Access Channel (PRACH)
1996. MSs uses this channel whenever they need to access the
network to initiate an uplink packet transfer or to respond to
The purpose of the GPRS is to efficiently accommodate data paging messages in order to initiate a downlink packet
users which are bursty in nature with an activity factor from 1 transfer.
to 5 %. We will take profit of this peculiarity by increasing Packet Paging Channel (PPCH)
the number of users that share a few channels, fixing a It is used to page a MS prior to downlink packet transfer.
maximum access delay. Packet Access Grant Channel (PAGCH)
This channel is used in the packet transfer establishment phase
Another important aspect of GPRS is the total compatibility to send channel reservation acknowledgements to a MS prior
with the GSM architecture. Voice and GPRS services have to to packet transfer.
be able to coexist in the same environment with the minimum Packet Broadcast Control Channel (PBCCH)
changes in the system. The main idea is to allocate resources This channel broadcasts the packet data specific system
depending on the GPRS demand. This feature operates in a information to all GPRS terminals in a cell.
capacity on demand mode which is explained in the following
Packet Traffic Channels (PTCHs)
point.
Packet Data Traffic Channel (PDTCH)
This channel is allocated for data transfer. It is temporarily
B. Capacity-on-demand
dedicated to one MS or to a group of MSs in the PTM-M
(Point-to-Multipoint Multicast) case. In the multislot
The capacity-on-demand concept has been introduced in order
operation, one MS can use multiple PDTCHs in parallel for
to keep compatibility with the existing GSM circuit-switched
individual packet transfer.
resources. The need to achieve this compatibility has
Packet Associated Control Channel (PACCH)
definitely influenced the design of the GPRS air interface
This channel conveys signalling information related to a given
protocol, being the concept capacity-on-demand responsible
MS. The signalling information includes acknowledgements,
for accomplishing this basic requirement.
power control information, and timing advance. PACCH
carries also resource allocation messages, either for the
Resources for GPRS may be dynamically allocated depending
allocation of a capacity on PDTCH or for further occurrences
on how many users require them with a given quality of
of PACCH. One PACCH is associated to one or several
service and depending also on how many resources are
PDTCHs that are assigned to one MS.
available at the moment. The operator can decide whether to
permanently dedicate some physical resources for GPRS.
The multiframe structure specified in [2] defines the mapping
Load supervision is carried out in the MAC layer to monitor
in time of the logical channels. The multiframe structure for
the load of the GPRS physical resources, and it’s the function
PDCH consists of 52 TDMA frames, divided into 12 RLC
that will allow increasing or decreasing the number of
blocks and 4 idle frames. Each block is sent on 4 consecutive
allocated resources according to the existing demand. The
frames. The block distribution is:
operator has also the choice to dedicate temporarily physical
• On a downlink PDCH that contains PCCCH, the first assignment we have used a backoff algorithm of 500 idle
block in the multiframe may be used as PBCCH. The slots.
other blocks can be used as additional PBCCH, PAGCH,
PPCH, PDTCH or PACCH. D. Coding scheme
• On an uplink PDCH that contains PCCCH, all blocks in
the multiframe can be used as PRACH, PDTCH or The coding scheme has a 40-bit fire code and a code rate 1/2.
PACCH. The uplink state flag in the previous downlink The RLC block has a size of 184 bits (23 bytes), where the
block indicates the use as PRACH. header field carries the first 24 bits (3 bytes) and the
• On a PDCH that does not contain PCCCH, all blocks can information field carries the following 160 bits (20 bytes).
be used as PDTCH or PACCH. This results in an LLC data rate of 8 Kbps and an RLC data
rate of 9,05 Kbps. To obtain more details we refer to [3].
IV. NUMERICAL DETAILS
E. Multiframe structure
A. Traffic models used
In all the results we present we have used just one MPDCH
The traffic models used in our simulations are the Mobitex that only carries PCCCHs. All the available slots in the uplink
and Railway models, according to the ETSI document for multiframe have been used as PRACH. The distribution of the
evaluation criteria [6]. logical channels over the downlink multiframe is shown in the
figure 1.
The Mobitex model is based on statistics collected from a
fleet management application using the Mobitex wireless
packet data network in Sweden: F. Other assumptions
• uplink: 30 + rand(-15, 15) bytes
We have considered an error-free physical medium. Thus, no
• downlink: 115 + rand(-57, 57) bytes
backward error correction procedures and retransmission of
erroneous blocks have been used in our simulations.
The Railway model is based upon an assessment of railway
application requirements. An approximation of the cumulative
distribution function with an average message length of 170
bytes and a maximum length of 1000 bytes is:
x
−
F ( x) = P( x ≤ M ); F ( x) = 1 − e 170
As for the Railway model, the same results are shown in Figure 3: Access delay using the Mobitex and Railway traffic models
Figure 2. The throughput has the same ascending linear
tendency, and the maximum throughput is reached as well for Figure 3 shows the same results for the Railway model. Now
up to N=2. However, in this case we realise that the maximum the minimum average delay is slightly increased to 80 ms.
throughput value has been significantly increased with regard However, the most important thing we observe is that the
to the Mobitex model to almost 0,7. This makes us realise that number of users who access the network has been
the GPRS performance depends a lot on the input traffic significantly increased. For an upper threshold of 300 ms , up
statistics. to 120 users may be given access, which means that in this
case 45 users more will be able to make use of the GPRS. As
B. Access delay we already concluded in the throughput analysis, the traffic
model we are using for simulations is definetely affecting the
The minimum average access delay reached is 60 ms (figure GPRS performance.
3) when few users are accessing the network. The access
delay has an ascending tendency with little slope at the Another important difference with regards to Mobitex is that
beginning, but as the number of users increases for a given now system saturation occurs for 3 SPDCHs. Now the step
number of SPDCHs, this ascending tendency starts to increase between 2 and 3 SPDCHs implies an improvement in
with a higher slope, until the system becomes unstable. capacity. Saturation happens at 3 SPDCHs. There's no point
Therefore, though our results have been displayed for an in assigning more than 3 SPDCHs.
average display of up to 1 second, we clearly see that it would
be no good to reach this point because of instability reasons. C. 95th percentile of access delay
A lower threshold should be taken into account when users
want to access the network, and when the number of users is Figure 4 shows the 95th percentile of access delay for the
about to overcome this threshold, the operator should stop Mobitex model. Now the minimum value is 140 ms for few
giving access to more users or, in case he has more SPDCHs users on the network. The 95th percentile of access delay is
at his disposal, he would assign a new one allowing to much more restrictive than the average access delay. For the
increase the number of users. example given before, if we'd like to warranty a 95th
percentile lower than 500 ms, up to 55 users could be
As an example, let's assume that all users require for their simultaneously using the GPRS with 2 or more SPDCHs.
applications an average access delay not higher than 300 ms.
Up to 50 users could be given access for only one SPDCH. If As for the Railway model (figure 4), the minimum value is
now 160 ms, and the maximum number of users allowed to
use the GPRS at the same time is 90 with 3 or more SPDCHs. VI. CONCLUSIONS
Again we see that we can afford a higher capacity with the
Railway model. In this paper we studied the capacity of the GPRS
specification to introduce packet-switched services in the
GSM system. First we introduced the GPRS proposal,
presenting its physical and logical channels, multiframe
structure and services which could be carried. It is easy to
forecast that the GPRS will allow a more efficient use of the
air interface of the GSM system when the users were bursty in
nature.
VII. REFERENCES
Figure 4: 95%-Access delay using the Mobitex and Railway traffic models
Figure 5: 95%-Access delay using the Mobitex and the Railway traffic
models