Recent advancement in personal communication services (PCS) provides wireless multimedia services for users on the move. For establishing the convenient access environment, the evolution of IP-based integrated scheme becomes very urgent for public wireless access systems. In this paper, we clarify the well-known issues of integrating the general packet radio service (GPRS) network and IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN). These issues include the inconsistence in transmission rate and coverage area, the difficulty in seamless handoff, the complexities of mobile IP and address translations, and so on. Based on classified cases, we propose the circular probe strategy (CPS) to solve the IP translations and measure the precise handoff latency of a mobile node roaming from one network to another. This latency information helps a mobile node and its home agent (HA) to decide the appropriate handoff timing, to maximize the data transmission rate, and to perform seamless handoff in the heterogeneous system. We also proposed the smart access point (AP) mechanism to reduce the overhead of CPS and to provide precise handoff latency information for mobile nodes (MNs) to select the most appropriate AP for association. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed smart handoff scheme performs better than traditional algorithms in terms of handoff time in the integrated network.

In this paper, we analyzed the performance of dynamic resource allocation with channel de-allocation and buffering in cellular networks. Buffers are applied for data traffic to reduce the packet loss probability while channel de-allocation is exploited to reduce the voice blocking probability. The results show that while buffering data traffic can reduce the packet loss probability, it has negative impact on the voice performance even if channel de-allocation is exploited. Although the voice blocking probability can be reduced with large slot capacity, the improvement decreases as the slot capacity increases. On the contrary, the packet loss probability increases as the slot capacity increases. In addition to the mean value analysis, the delay distribution and the 95% delay of data packets are provided.

In General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), combined mobility management is defined to efficiently perform both GSM and GPRS mobility management in a combined manner. In this letter, an enhanced scheme for combined mobility management based on a new mobile station (MS) state model is proposed. The steady state probabilities of the proposed MS state model are derived and the performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed. The results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional scheme, especially for low mobility MSs.

General packet radio service (GPRS) uses a two-stage mechanism to allocate uplink radio resource to mobile stations (MSs). In stage-1, the base station (BS) assigns several packet data channels (PDCHs) to an MS. Furthermore, a PDCH may be assigned to multiple MSs. In stage-2, therefore, the BS selects one of the multiplexed MSs in a PDCH to use the radio resource. In this paper, maintaining a load balance between PDCHs in stage-1 is examined and several selection schemes to lower the mis-selection rate in stage-2 are proposed. From our simulation results, the cost deduced from the poor load balancing and selection schemes render a lower system throughput and a non-negligible increase in packet queuing delay. Among the various stage-2 selection policies, round robin with linearly-accumulated adjustment (RRLAA) has the lowest mis-selection rate and outperforms the one without any heuristic by up to 50%.

The General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a new bearer service for GSM that greatly improves and simplifies wireless access to packet data networks, e.g., to the Internet. It applies a packet radio principle to transfer user data packets in an efficient way between mobile stations and external packet data networks. This tutorial gives an introduction to GPRS. The article discusses the system architecture and its basic functionality. It explains the offered services, the session and mobility management, the routing, the GPRS air interface including channel coding, and the GPRS protocol architecture. Finally, an interworking example between GPRS and IP networks is shown.

The proliferation and development of cellular voice systems over the past several years has exposed the capabilities and the effectiveness of wireless communications and, thus, has paved the way for wide-area wireless data applications as well. The demand for such applications is currently experiencing a significant increase and, therefore, there is a strong call for advanced and efficient mobile data technologies. This article deals with these mobile data technologies and aims to exhibit their potential. It provides a thorough survey of the most important mobile packet data services and technologies, including MOBITEX, CDPD, ARDIS, and the emerging GPRS. For each technology, the article outlines its main technical characteristics, discusses its architectural aspects, and explains the medium access protocol, the services provided, and the mobile routing scheme.