Analysis of the QoS requirements under radio access network planning aspects for GPRS/EDGE and UMTS

The upcoming teleservices in mobile networks require quality of service (QoS) support, which have to be considered during the radio access network (RAN) planning. QoS becomes one of the most important points for the network planning process. Mobile network providers that want to offer information services based on QoS, have to plan their networks and their network capacity according to user demands. Traditional RAN planning tools consider only "best effort" service for all applications since RANs were not able to guarantee QoS before release 99 of 3GPP specifications. This has consequences in network planning and user satisfaction; therefore it is necessary to take the QoS requirements of each application of every user into account during the planning process. This paper presents an analysis of the available 3GPP QoS mechanisms in the different releases in order to include factors in RAN planning for QoS support. Finally, the differences in the RAN dimensioning between "best effort" and QoS support are exemplified.