Helmut Heinz

Privileged Treatment of UMTS Subscribers in GSM Networks

Different user segments have various requirements and expectations towards the performance of mobile networks. Subscribers having experienced the high quality of UMTS networks desire to maintain high speech quality and excellent data throughput also in areas of missing UMTS but existing GSM coverage. In GSM networks a privileged treatment of UMTS subscribers by means of proper resource allocation provides a substantial quality improvement with respect to standard GSM subscribers. This strategy allows network operators to reduce the performance gap between both network areas experienced by UMTS subscribers. A detailed study on the performance of circuit switched speech and packet data services has been performed based on system level simulations. The results show significant speech quality advantages for users with dual-RAT terminals compared to standard GSM users as well as notably higher data throughput rates.