Modeling and performance evaluation of General Packet Radio Service

General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a 2.5G cellular technology introduced as a bearer service for Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). In this thesis, we describe the development of a GPRS simulation model using the OPNET network simulation tool. We implement Base Station Subsystem (BSS), cell update procedure, Radio Link Control/Medium Access Control (RLC/MAC), and Base Station Subsystem GPRS protocol in the OPNET GPRS model. The developed model supports mobile nodes and two Quality of Service profiles. We simulate end-to-end delay and cell update mechanism and employ the simulation results to validate the OPNET implementation. We also evaluate the effect of cell update on GPRS end-to-end delay, time to process signaling messages, and link throughput. We simulate scenarios with and without cell updates using a network consisting of 15 users to illustrate that the end-to-end delay as perceived by the user and signaling processing time increase with cell update.