Overview and Capacity of the GPRS
(General Packet Radio Service)1
Carles Ferrer, Miquel Oliver
Applied Maths & Telematics, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Address: Jordi Girona 1-3, Mòdul C3, 08034 Barcelona, SPAIN
Email: moliver@mat.upc.es
ABSTRACT
An evaluation of the capacity of the GPRS, as a packet-
switched access mode for the GSM system, is studied in this
paper. The work has been done assuming an air interface
proposed in an ETSI draft document [1] and taking two traffic
models also standardised by this institution. Statistical
multiplexing allows several users to share radio channels
increasing the capacity of the system. Thus, the results
obtained are: throughput and access delay depending on the
number of subscribers each of them with an identical activity
factor. We have also studied the 95th percentile of access
delay and delay distributions in order to assure the QoS of the
system.
I. INTRODUCTION
The pan-European second generation mobile system GSM
(Global System for Mobile Communications) is in constant
evolution. After its successful entrance in the mobile
communication mass-market, the ETSI (European
Telecommunications Standard Institute) has been working to
improve its performance and to offer new services. Until now
all services carried by GSM have been circuit-switched based.
These services consist on voice and basic data facilities such
as facsimile transmission up to 9.6 Kbps.
One of the great advances in the GSM system will be the
introduction of services based on a packet-switching
technique. These services will provide a better use of the
radio resources with regards to increase capacity in number of
subscribers, and consequently to reduce tariffs. The ETSI has
been working on the specifications of the GPRS (General
Packet Radio Service) for three years, which nowadays is
reaching the end. Packet-switching technique is the best
accurate for data services with an activity factor from 1 to 5%,
e.g. internet applications. Using this technique several users
can share a pool of channels increasing its efficiency.
In this paper we have studied the capacity of the GPRS
system, taking into account two traffic models proposed by
ETSI. First we introduce the evolution and future trends of the
GSM system. Afterwards we present the GPRS system,
detailing the GSM-GPRS compatibility, logical channels and
air interface used. In section IV, which is titled Numerical
Details, we show the simulation environment and the traffic
models used to carry out this study. The results obtained, in
terms of access delay, throughput, 95%-access delay and
delay distribution are presented in section V. Finally we
1
The Spanish government in the CICYT project TIC97-0942 has funded this study.
explain the conclusions we have reached and the references
used.
II. GSM AND ITS EVOLUTION
At the end of September 1997 there were more than 55
million GSM subscribers in about 110 different countries.
Recent estimations get to point out that the GSM system will
have between 110 and 140 million customers by 1999, rising
to 200-270 millions by the year 2003.
These estimations are a good reason to propose modifications
of the GSM specification to get better performance. Now the
GSM standardisation process is in the called phase 2+, which
involves a large number of projects including improvement in
speech coding and advanced data transmission services.
A. GSM phase 2+
The GSM phase 2+ specification is involving several projects
that will improve the performance of the system increasing the
number of services and the Quality of Service of the
subscribers. Here we list some of these new features, where
one of them is obviously the GPRS specification:
- HSCSD, which stands for High Speed Circuit Switched
Data, will be the responsible for an increasing user’s
bandwidth.
- GPRS or General Packet Radio Service, studied in this
paper.
Both improvements in data transmission will offer a suitable
platform to support new services such as:
- Multimedia services such us videoconferencing and high
resolution scanners.
- Internet-Intranet access.
- Tools like electronic cash, teller machines, telematics
remote access, etc.
For speech services a greater effort is required. A new speech
coder has recently been developed. The new speech rate will
double the capacity of the current GSM system.
In Wireless Local Loop (WLL) field, GSM is a serious
candidate. The purpose is to reach user's home with a bearer
of 64 Kbps of digital connections.
B. Switched Packet Services over GSM
The range of services that can be supported by the packet-
switching technique is enormous. The data services which are
offered range from a simple mobile internet access to a remote
telematics service. The possibilities are great if statistical
multiplexing between the sources can apply.
One of the advantages of the packet-switching technique is
charging. Whereas in circuit-switching a call is charged using
a time-oriented criteria, in packet-switching the charge can be
applied depending on the amount of data transmitted. This
fact can be really interesting for users that need to be in touch
for long but transmitting little amount of data.
Another important factor is the Quality of Service (QoS)
offered by these services. The QoS can be negotiated when
starting the session and can be renegotiated if it is required.
The QoS agreed between the user and the network can be
used to charge the service.
III. GPRS
A. Introduction
The work on the GPRS specification began in 1994 while the
standard is expected to be published at the end of 1997 or at
the beginning of 1998. During this period the ETSI has
produced some draft documents in order to fulfil the GPRS
specification. In this work we have assumed the air interface
protocol presented in [1], which was proposed in September
1996.
The purpose of the GPRS is to efficiently accommodate data
users which are bursty in nature with an activity factor from 1
to 5 %. We will take profit of this peculiarity by increasing
the number of users that share a few channels, fixing a
maximum access delay.
Another important aspect of GPRS is the total compatibility
with the GSM architecture. Voice and GPRS services have to
be able to coexist in the same environment with the minimum
changes in the system. The main idea is to allocate resources
depending on the GPRS demand. This feature operates in a
capacity on demand mode which is explained in the following
point.
B. Capacity-on-demand
The capacity-on-demand concept has been introduced in order
to keep compatibility with the existing GSM circuit-switched
resources. The need to achieve this compatibility has
definitely influenced the design of the GPRS air interface
protocol, being the concept capacity-on-demand responsible
for accomplishing this basic requirement.
Resources for GPRS may be dynamically allocated depending
on how many users require them with a given quality of
service and depending also on how many resources are
available at the moment. The operator can decide whether to
permanently dedicate some physical resources for GPRS.
Load supervision is carried out in the MAC layer to monitor
the load of the GPRS physical resources, and it’s the function
that will allow increasing or decreasing the number of
allocated resources according to the existing demand. The
operator has also the choice to dedicate temporarily physical
resources for GPRS as long as no other higher-priority GSM
services require them.
One of the purposes of the present work is to study the
thresholds where to enable/disable channels depending on the
number of active users and its traffic profile.
C. Physical Channels
The physical channel dedicated to GPRS traffic is called a
Packet Data Channel (PDCH). At least one PDCH, acting as a
master, accommodates Packet Common Control Channels
(PCCCHs) that carry all the control signalling necessary for
initiating packet transfer, and Packet Traffic Channels
(PTCH) which carry user data and dedicated signalling. This
is called the Master Packet Data Channel (MPDCH).
Other PDCHs, acting as slaves, may only carry PTCHs, that is
to say, user data and dedicated signalling. This is called the
Slave Packet Data Channel (SPDCH).
D. Logical Channels and air interface
The logical channels, which can be mapped on a PDCH
(Packet Data Channels), are (see figure 1):
Packet Common Control Channels (PCCCHs)
Packet Random Access Channel (PRACH)
MSs uses this channel whenever they need to access the
network to initiate an uplink packet transfer or to respond to
paging messages in order to initiate a downlink packet
transfer.
Packet Paging Channel (PPCH)
It is used to page a MS prior to downlink packet transfer.
Packet Access Grant Channel (PAGCH)
This channel is used in the packet transfer establishment phase
to send channel reservation acknowledgements to a MS prior
to packet transfer.
Packet Broadcast Control Channel (PBCCH)
This channel broadcasts the packet data specific system
information to all GPRS terminals in a cell.
Packet Traffic Channels (PTCHs)
Packet Data Traffic Channel (PDTCH)
This channel is allocated for data transfer. It is temporarily
dedicated to one MS or to a group of MSs in the PTM-M
(Point-to-Multipoint Multicast) case. In the multislot
operation, one MS can use multiple PDTCHs in parallel for
individual packet transfer.
Packet Associated Control Channel (PACCH)
This channel conveys signalling information related to a given
MS. The signalling information includes acknowledgements,
power control information, and timing advance. PACCH
carries also resource allocation messages, either for the
allocation of a capacity on PDTCH or for further occurrences
of PACCH. One PACCH is associated to one or several
PDTCHs that are assigned to one MS.
The multiframe structure specified in [2] defines the mapping
in time of the logical channels. The multiframe structure for
PDCH consists of 52 TDMA frames, divided into 12 RLC
blocks and 4 idle frames. Each block is sent on 4 consecutive
frames. The block distribution is:
• On a downlink PDCH that contains PCCCH, the first
block in the multiframe may be used as PBCCH. The
other blocks can be used as additional PBCCH, PAGCH,
PPCH, PDTCH or PACCH.
• On an uplink PDCH that contains PCCCH, all blocks in
the multiframe can be used as PRACH, PDTCH or
PACCH. The uplink state flag in the previous downlink
block indicates the use as PRACH.
• On a PDCH that does not contain PCCCH, all blocks can
be used as PDTCH or PACCH.
IV. NUMERICAL DETAILS
A. Traffic models used
The traffic models used in our simulations are the Mobitex
and Railway models, according to the ETSI document for
evaluation criteria [6].
The Mobitex model is based on statistics collected from a
fleet management application using the Mobitex wireless
packet data network in Sweden:
• uplink: 30 + rand(-15, 15) bytes
• downlink: 115 + rand(-57, 57) bytes
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
B. Capture model
During the contention phase, the following capture model is
used in our simulation environment. According to the
proposed ETSI evaluation criteria [6]: if n is the number of
access bursts sent during the same burst period on a single
channel, the probability p of successful receipt related to one
burst is:
1 2 3 4 5 >5
N transmitted per access delay.
1.00 0.67 0.48 0.40 0.35 0.00
P All results are presented for different N values where this
C. Activity factor
Because our work has been focused on getting results about
the capacity of the GPRS radio channels for an increasing
number of users, an activity factor has been assumed for each
mobile station. We have defined the activity factor as the ratio
between the average source activity time and the average time
between the first random access for an LLC frame transfer and
the next random access for another LLC frame transfer. In our
simulations we have assumed an activity factor of 1%.
The maximum number of random access attempts per frame is
7, and for the maximum waiting time for a resource
assignment we have used a backoff algorithm of 500 idle
slots.
D. Coding scheme
The coding scheme has a 40-bit fire code and a code rate 1/2.
The RLC block has a size of 184 bits (23 bytes), where the
header field carries the first 24 bits (3 bytes) and the
information field carries the following 160 bits (20 bytes).
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].
E. Multiframe structure
In all the results we present we have used just one MPDCH
that only carries PCCCHs. All the available slots in the uplink
multiframe have been used as PRACH. The distribution of the
logical channels over the downlink multiframe is shown in the
figure 1.
F. Other assumptions
We have considered an error-free physical medium. Thus, no
backward error correction procedures and retransmission of
erroneous blocks have been used in our simulations.
Figure1: Logical channels in GPRS
V. RESULTS
The performance measures we have obtained from our
simulations are:
- Throughput: the occupation of the PDTCHs expressed as
a percentage.
- Access delay: the time elapsed since a message is
generated till the first data burst is sent across the radio
interface.
- Delay distribution: the amount of carried-out LLC frames
variable is the number of SPDCHs allocated to carry GPRS
traffic.
A. Throughput
Figure 2 shows the throughput for the Mobitex model. We
observe that for a given number of users, the throughput
decreases as we increase the number of SPDCHs available.
The throughput has an ascending linear tendency, but there's a
point where this tendency changes and becomes descending.
That's the point where too much users are trying to access the
network and collisions take place, or when the common
control channels have become much too slow to give access
efficiently to all users without excessive delay, and
consequently some access trials are not successful.

The maximum throughput value reached is almost 0,4-0,45
for N=1 and N=2 in the Mobitex model. This means that,
more than half the simulation time, the system resources for
packet data transmission are not used. For N>3, the maximum
throughput starts to decrease. Therefore, there's no need to
assign more than 2 SPDCHs for packet data transmission. It is
not going to result in a quality of service improvement, but it
will stay in a steady state, no matter how many more SPDCHs
we add.
Figure 2: Throughput using the Mobitex and Railway traffic models
As for the Railway model, the same results are shown in
Figure 2. The throughput has the same ascending linear
tendency, and the maximum throughput is reached as well for
up to N=2. However, in this case we realise that the maximum
throughput value has been significantly increased with regard
to the Mobitex model to almost 0,7. This makes us realise that
the GPRS performance depends a lot on the input traffic
statistics.
B. Access delay
The minimum average access delay reached is 60 ms (figure
3) when few users are accessing the network. The access
delay has an ascending tendency with little slope at the
beginning, but as the number of users increases for a given
number of SPDCHs, this ascending tendency starts to increase
with a higher slope, until the system becomes unstable.
Therefore, though our results have been displayed for an
average display of up to 1 second, we clearly see that it would
be no good to reach this point because of instability reasons.
A lower threshold should be taken into account when users
want to access the network, and when the number of users is
about to overcome this threshold, the operator should stop
giving access to more users or, in case he has more SPDCHs
at his disposal, he would assign a new one allowing to
increase the number of users.
As an example, let's assume that all users require for their
applications an average access delay not higher than 300 ms.
Up to 50 users could be given access for only one SPDCH. If
we have the chance to increase the number of SPDCHs, up to
85 users could be allowed to access the network.
We arrive to the same conclusion as for the throughput
analysis. There is no improvement assigning more than
2 SPDCHs. Thus, average access delay is not going to be
reduced. The reason is that the logical channels that carry all
the signalling information become a bottleneck, and a better
performance of the GPRS to give access to more users would
require another MPDCH to help supporting all the signalling
information. This would also make collisions happen less
often.
Figure 3: Access delay using the Mobitex and Railway traffic models
Figure 3 shows the same results for the Railway model. Now
the minimum average delay is slightly increased to 80 ms.
However, the most important thing we observe is that the
number of users who access the network has been
significantly increased. For an upper threshold of 300 ms , up
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
we already concluded in the throughput analysis, the traffic
model we are using for simulations is definetely affecting the
GPRS performance.
Another important difference with regards to Mobitex is that
now system saturation occurs for 3 SPDCHs. Now the step
between 2 and 3 SPDCHs implies an improvement in
capacity. Saturation happens at 3 SPDCHs. There's no point
in assigning more than 3 SPDCHs.
C. 95th percentile of access delay
Figure 4 shows the 95th percentile of access delay for the
Mobitex model. Now the minimum value is 140 ms for few
users on the network. The 95th percentile of access delay is
much more restrictive than the average access delay. For the
example given before, if we'd like to warranty a 95th
percentile lower than 500 ms, up to 55 users could be
simultaneously using the GPRS with 2 or more SPDCHs.
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.
Again we see that we can afford a higher capacity with the
Railway model.
Figure 4: 95%-Access delay using the Mobitex and Railway traffic models
D. Delay distribution
The delay distribution for the Mobitex model is shown in
figure 5. It corresponds to a simulation with 80 users with an
activity factor of 1% each. The average access delay is 291,67
ms and the 95th percentile is 1 s 157,31 ms.
In figure 5 we show the delay distribution for the Railway
model. In this case, we have 115 users with an activity factor
of 1% each. The average access delay is 266,48 ms and the
95th percentile is 962,89 ms.
We can see a noticeable difference between both distributions.
This fact explains the difference between the results found in
the previous points.
Figure 5: 95%-Access delay using the Mobitex and the Railway traffic
models
VI. CONCLUSIONS
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.
In our simulations we have found a thresholds for the capacity
of the GPRS. These thresholds are fixed in number of users,
each of them with an activity factor of 1%. An important
conclusion reached is that the performance variables studied
(throughput and access delay) are heavily dependent on the
traffic statistics of the mobile users. Recent papers ([4], [5])
reached to similar conclusions although the simulation
environment and some performance measures were different.
VII. REFERENCES
[1] Draft ETSI GSM 04.60 “Digital Cellular
Telecommunications System: General Packet Radio
Service (GPRS): (phase 2+): Overall description of the
GPRS Radio Interface (Um)”, ver 0.9.0, 18 September
1996.
[2] Rec. GSM 05.01, “European digital cellular
telecommunications system (phase 2+): Physical layer
on the radio path: General Description”.
[3] Rec. GSM 05.03, “European digital cellular
telecommunications system (phase 2+): Channel
Coding”.
[4] G. Brasche, B. Walke, Concepts, Services, and
Protocols of the New GSM phase 2+ General Packet
Radio service, IEEE Communications Magazine, August
1997.
[5] J. Cai, D.J. Goodman, General Packet Radio Service in
GSM, IEEE Communications Magazine, October 1997.
[6] ETSI SMG2 GPRS Ad-Hoc Tdoc 84/95, “Evaluation
Criteria for the GPRS Radio Channel”, Sophia
Antipolis, France, October 1995.