Outage Probability in GSM-GPRS Cellular Systems With and Without Frequency Hopping

General packet radio service(GPRS) is designed for transmitting packet data andis supposed to take its radio resource from the pool ofunused channels of GSM voice services. Obviously, theintroduction of GPRS has an impact on the voice services.In this paper, we present a method to calculate theoutage probability of the GSM-GPRS network for bothnon-frequency hopping and frequency hoppingsystems. This method takes into account Rayleighfading, power control (with error), discontinuoustransmission, and frequency hopping (if applied). Theoutage probability of voice services affected by theintroduction of GPRS is discussed. The number ofunused voice channels allocated to GPRS depends on thedifference between the outage level of the existingGSM network and the maximum acceptable level. Thefrequency hopping system can accommodate more GPRStraffic than the non-frequency hopping system. Thepower control error has more impact on systemperformance when more channels are allocated to GPRS.Beyond our expectations, for the non-frequency hoppingsystem, the channels provided for GPRS are not muchdifferent between high channel occupancy and lowchannel occupancy of voice services. In contrast, for thefrequency hopping system, the system can provide morechannels for GPRS at low channel occupancy. The cellservice area decreases by about 10% ∼ 20% for eachadditional channel allocated to GPRS.