Measured Performance of GSM HSCSD and GPRS
Jouni Korhonen
Olli Aalto
Andrei Gurtov
Heimo Laamanen
In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Communications, Helsinki, Finland, June 2001.
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Abstract
In this paper we present results of measurements
on the performance of GSM HSCSD and GPRS data
transmission. We used a measurement tool that we have
developed to study the performance of various wireless links as
perceived by nomadic applications using the TCP protocol. The
results show that in stationary connections the throughput and
response time were stable and, in general, close to the
theoretical values. However, the throughput and response time
varied a lot when connections were used in motion. One of the
reasons is that TCP was not capable to adapt itself properly to
the variability of QoS of HSCSD and GPRS, and therefore, it
did a lot of unnecessary retransmissions causing performance
slowdown. The performance of HSCSD was better than the
performance of GPRS. Reliability was adequate in stationary
connections, but in moving connections there were unwanted
disconnections or long pauses in data transfer.