Supporting voice over EGPRS: System design and capacity evaluation

We investigate the possibility of supporting voice over EGPRS as a potential evolutionary path for 2nd generation wireless TDMA systems. We discuss different voice bearer designs for EGPRS radio access networks. We demonstrate how the operating mode can be chosen at each layer in the protocol stack to form appropriate voice bearers, and quantify the performance of these bearers. Different system control options are examined, including frequency reuse factor, MAC layer operating mode, frequency hopping, power control, and dynamic channel assignment. We find that a baseline EGPRS system using random channel assignment and no power control can support up to 27 Erlang/Site/MHz, which is significantly higher than the capacity of current 2nd generation TDMA systems. In addition, the packet-switched nature of EGPRS makes it a very flexible system. We conclude that EGPRS offers an excellent evolutionary path for 2nd generation TDMA systems.