A performance evaluation of Internet access via the General Packet Radio Service of GSM

The General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is currently being standardized by the European Telecommunications Standard Institute (ETSI) to extend the services provided by the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). The GPRS is dedicated to support packet-oriented traffic, e.g. Internet traffic. Packet oriented transmission is by nature better suited to convey bursty traffic, as it is generated by Internet applications. Applications contributing most to the data volume in the Internet are WWW, FTP and e-mail. This paper presents a simulator, which was developed to assess the performance of the GPRS when used as a means of access to the Internet. The focus is on the evaluation of the interaction between the protocols applied in the Internet and for the GPRS. Only by considering both parts is the assessment of the overall performance, which will be recognized by the end-user, possible. This paper presents the simulation environment and discusses the simulation results regarding the end-to-end performance of TCP/IP based applications. It is shown that the GPRS is a suitable wireless access to Internet applications