Scheduler based flow control under QoS aspects in GPRS/EDGE networks

The demand for minimization of the exploitation costs in the modern world of mobile communication has achieved the point where the network operators require new networks that are able to reconfigure themselves according to the current network state and user activities. This implies new research in the area of self-configurable networks. This paper presents the results of investigation of the QoS aware GPRS/EDGE networks focused on the flow control at the Gb interface. A new approach for the flow control is presented, which introduces a scheduler architecture instead of a "leaky buckets" architecture. The STFQ algorithm is used as a scheduler in the new architecture. The simulation results show that a significant increase in system performance can be achieved by minimizing the effect of the "cascaded leaky buckets phenomenon".