Performance study of GPRS in mobile communications

Abstract

The General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a packet-switched enhancement of existing Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) networks. It is developed to allow large amounts of data to be sent over cellular networks at speeds three to four times greater than conventional GSM systems. Because GSM is the most widely used mobile system in the world for most operators, GPRS is the easiest and most logical way of offering customers fast simultaneous data services, such as multimedia messaging, gaming, entertainment, and news. The success or otherwise of GPRS will be dependent on its ability to deliver the data speeds and services that the industry has been promising the subscriber. In order to measure the performance of GPRS, as seen by the subscriber, would then depending on many different factors. Thus, the aim of this project is to analyse the performance of GPRS services that network operators are promising to the subscribers and to discuss the measurement results of GPRS end-user application performance subject to various channel conditions. A detailed comparison between two GPRS networks, Maxis and Celcom for HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) application and Packet Internet Groper (PING) application performance is provided