Abstract

The development of GSM is currently focused on packet-switched services. The first solution to provide such services is known as General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), which has been deployed commercially. A further step comes with Enhanced General Packet Radio Service (EGPRS). To improve the capacity and achieve more efficient utilization of the frequency spectrum of cellular systems, the Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) using smart antenna has drawn wide attention in recent years. However, its application, especially on GSM/EGPRS network, still needs further investigation. This work aims to evaluate the performance of the GSM/EGPRS cellular network employing SDMA, together with a complete Dynamic Channel Allocation (DCA) strategy, from various perspectives. Simulation results show that SDMA can greatly increase the system capacity, and that the data rate, the distribution of users, the propagation environments, the channel assignment schemes, the antenna sidelobe levels and the buffersize of users all have great influence on the performance of the EGPRS network with SDMA.