Enhancing the General Packet Radio Service with IP QoS Support

Abstract

The General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is the current enhancement in the GSM infrastructure, capable of handling Internet Protocol (IP) traffic for mobile computing and communications. A major deficiency of the current GPRS specification is the lack of adequate IP Quality of Service (QoS) support. In this paper a QoS aware architecture for enhancing the GPRS core network with IP QoS support is presented. The proposed scheme is based on the Integrated Services (Intserv) architecture, processed in the IETF during the past years. The applicability of the proposed architecture as well as the required signalling enhancements and modifications in the components of the GPRS architecture are discussed. To identify the applicability of our proposal in a real GPRS network, a simulation model of the proposed IntServ architecture was developed in order to quantify the effect that signalling overhead has on the GPRS operation and performance. The obtained simulation results show that the proposed scheme demonstrated good scalability, even for large user populations.