Modeling and analysis of mobility management state of packet-switched (PS) services in GPRS

There has been an increasing demand for wireless data services due to the popularity of Internet services and circuit-switched (CS) systems are not appropriate for accommodating bursty data traffic. The wireless data services can be efficiently supported in the packet-switched (PS) system and General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a representative PS system which is being serviced widely. In GPRS, three mobile station (MS) mobility management states, i.e., idle, ready, and standby are defined in order to accommodate bursty traffic characteristics of data services, and thus, GPRS results in efficient management of radio resources and signaling networks. In order to analyze the performance of GPRS mobility management, we develop an analytical model to derive the steady-state probability of the MS states, which is essential in the performance analysis. The analytical model is validated by using a simulation model. The effect of various input parameters on the steady-state probability and the effect of variances of cell residence time, RA residence time, and packet transmission time are analyzed. Then, location update signaling and paging signaling loads are investigated based on the steady-state probability. Our study provides guideline for proper selection of PS system parameters and can be used to analyze the performance of mobility management schemes for PS systems.