Wireless Internet access based on GPRS

Enabling wireless Internet access is one of the upcoming challenges for mobile radio network operators. The General Packet Radio Service is the packet-switched extension of GSM and was developed to facilitate access to IP-based services compared to existing circuit-switched services provided by GSM. Besides an overview on the basic concept, network architecture, and protocols of GPRS, this article discusses the performance the end user perceives when retrieving information from the Web using this access technology. This discussion is based on results obtained from a protocol simulator comprising not only the radio interface protocols, but also the relevant Internet protocols as well as a characteristic application model. The results show that GPRS provides bandwidth-efficient support for bursty applications like Web access.