Adaptive Radio Resource Management for GSM/GPRS Networks

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in demand for mobile communication services and with the introduction of 2.5G services such as GPRS, this trend is expected to increase further. The highly dynamic and bursty nature of packet switched services such as GPRS will require a much more flexible method of radio resource management so as to maximise system resources compared to currently employed fixed channel allocation (FCA) schemes. In this paper we propose a new pro-active method for increasing network capacity by introducing an adaptive radio resource management system into a typical GSM/GPRS network. The adaptive radio resource management system predicts future radio resource requirements for both circuit switched GSM calls and packet switched GPRS sessions using neural networks (NNs). Frequency assignment is then performed using a genetic algorithm (GA). Results are presented which exhibit less resource requirements than existing fixed channel allocation (FCA) networks and performance that is comparable to recently proposed dynamic resource allocation (DRA) schemes, but with the advantage of significantly less complexity and no additional network signalling load.