Resource management policies in GPRS systems

In this paper we consider the problem of resource management in GSM/GPRS cellular networks offering not only mobile telephony services, but also data services for the wireless access to the Internet. In particular, we investigate channel allocation policies that can provide a good tradeoff between the QoS guaranteed to voice and data services end users, considering three different alternatives, and developing analytical techniques for the assessment of their relative merits. The first channel allocation policy, voice priority, gives priority to voice in the access to radio channels; we show that this policy cannot provide acceptable performance to data services, since when all the channels are busy with voice connections, data services perceive long intervals of service interruption. The second channel allocation policy is called R-reservation; it statically reserves a fixed number of channels to data services, thus drastically improving their performance, but subtracting resources from voice users, even when these are not needed for data, thus inducing an unnecessary performance degradation for voice services. The third channel allocation policy is called dynamic reservation; as the name implies, it dynamically allocates channels to data when necessary, using the information about the queue length of GPRS data units within the base station. A threshold on the queue length is used in order to decide when channels must be allocated to data. Numerical results show that the dynamic reservation channel allocation policy can provide effective performance tradeoffs for data and voice services, with the additional advantage of being easily managed through the setting of the threshold value. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.