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.