Evaluation of the impact of congestion on service availability of GPRS infrastructures

This paper deals with the congestion analysis of a GPRS infrastructure composed by a number of adjacent cells partially overlapped. We consider that one cell can be affected by an outage and we perform a transient analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of applying a specific class of resource management techniques for congestion treatment. The classical availability analysis is here enhanced taking into account the important congestion phenomenon 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 resolution technique in which the solution of the entire model is constructed on the basis of the solutions of the individual sub-models.