LLC-MAC analysis of general packet radio service in GSM

General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is one of the major services currently standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) for Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) Phase 2+. GPRS has been introduced to support bursty packet-switched traffic such as e-mail, World Wide Web traffic, and telemetry. This paper presents a unified analytical model of two GPRS protocols, namely, logical link control (LLC) and radio link control/medium access control (RLC/MAC). The interaction between selective automatic repeat-request (ARQ) schemes at the two layers is investigated. In order to save scarce radio resources, we calculate a finite optimal number of RLC/MAC retransmissions per LLC frame as a function of the number of radio link errors and the LLC frame size. A novel channel-dependent ARQ mechanism is introduced at the LLC layer. Finally, throughput and delay performances of the two ARQ stacks are presented.

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