Internet Access over GPRS1
Apostolis K. Salkintzis · 2004
GPRS is a bearer service of the Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications, which offers packet data capabilities. The key characteristic of the data service provided by GPRS is that it operates in endto-end packet mode . This means that no communication resources are exclusively reserved for supporting the communication needs of every individual mobile user. On the contrary, the communication resources are utilized on a demand basis and are statistically multiplexed between several mobile users. This characteristic renders GPRS ideal for applications with irregular traffic properties (such as Web browsing), because, with this type of traffic, the benefits of statistical multiplexing are exploited; that is, we obtain high utilization efficiency of the communication resources. A direct effect of this property is the drastically increased capacity of the system in the sense that we can support a large number of mobile users with only a limited amount of communication resources. The increased capacity offered by GPRS, combined with the end-to-end packet transfer capabilities, constitute the main factors that drive the use of GPRS in providing wide-area wireless Internet access.