Signaling Performance Trials and Evaluation Results on a GPRS Platform

Generic Packet Radio Service (GPRS) enhances data transfers up to occasional transmission of large amounts of user data. Signaling procedures are specified for the provision of connection oriented services and the establishment of data channels between mobile subscribers. The time-overhead introduced with the performance of end-to-end signaling operations is a crucial performance factor that determines the provided Quality of Service (QoS). A significant time-overhead associated with the high rate establishment and release of many short-lived data channels, required during hand-over or for Internet access, would result in network performance degradation. Nevertheless, despite its main significance, there is a lack of papers in the Internet community that either investigate the issue of GPRS signaling performance or present GPRS trials and measurements. This lack becomes even more obvious and gets more importance from the moment that the deployment of GPRS, at least in the first phase, revealed significant performance delays in the connection setup times. To this respect, this paper presents the experiments conducted at a GPRS testing platform focusing on the performance assessment of signaling functionality. The trials focus on the performance evaluation of the GPRS signaling operations related to the establishment and release of user data channels through the Gn and Gi interfaces. Timing results that quantify the overall delay under diverse conditions of signaling load, rate and subscribers are presented.