Performance modeling of integrated mobile prepaid services

Abstract

Prepaid personal communication service users have outnumbered postpaid users. This paper studies the charging issues of an integrated Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) prepaid service, where a single prepaid account provides a user both voice and data services. The call setup and charging procedures for GSM and GPRS are presented using the Customized Applications for Mobile network Enhanced Logic network architecture. To reduce the probability of terminating both ongoing voice and data calls, we suggest that no new call be admitted when the user credit is below a threshold. An analytic model has been developed to evaluate the performance of the approach. Computer simulations have also been used to verify the results. The numeric results indicate that the force-termination probability can be significantly reduced by choosing an appropriate threshold of the user credit.