Evaluation of the Impact of Congestion on Service Availability in GPRS Infrastructures

This paper deals with the congestion analysis of a GPRS infrastructure composed by a number of adjacent cells partially over-lapped. We consider one cell as affected by an outage and through a transient analysis we evaluate the effectiveness of a specific class of resource management techniques for congestion treatment in terms of service availability related indicators. The classical availability analysis is thus enhanced, by taking into account the congestion following outages and its impact on user's perceived QoS, both in each cell and in the overall GPRS network. In order to efficiently solve the large and complex model capturing the network's behavior, we introduce a solution technique in which the solution of the entire model is constructed on the basis of the solutions of the individual sub-models. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.