On the suitability of GPRS for integrating ITS with non-ITS traffic

The intelligent transportation systems (ITS) will responsible for only a small fraction of the overall data traffic services carried by cellular networks, especially as the mobile multimedia traffic increases in evolved second generation systems. As such, ITS with its mainly short and bursty transactions, will piggyback perfectly on such a mobile multimedia background. We compare CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data), the US packet data overlay on analogue AMPS, with GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), the packet-switched service soon to be commercially available over GSM, for the purpose of carrying ITS on top of non-ITS traffic. With GPRS, ITS traffic is less affected by the non-ITS traffic (smaller delays in the presence of "heavy" users, and higher effective throughput) for the same traffic mixture. This, however, relies upon proper resource and load management in GPRS.