Though the conventional Global System of Mobile Communications (GSM) accommodated basic data services, growing demand for higher bit rates and efficient bandwidth utilization has motivated a new network accommodating General Packet Radio Services (GPRS). GPRS is an on-demand based bearer data service on the GSM air-interface offering quality of service (QoS) the users by dynamically allocating different amount of resource depending on user requirements such as throughput, delay, reliability and priority. GPRS Support Nodes (GSN) are introduced to support various GPRS services . The Serving GPRS Support Node (SGSN) keeps track of the location of mobile stations and performs security functions as well as access control. The Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN) provides interworking with external packet-switched networks. The control signaling traffic of a simplied GPRS network is evaluated in terms of signaling link utilization and response time by developing a simulator representing the GPRS control signaling network. The effect of state transitions of mobile stations, session management, and timer values for mobility management on the signaling network is investigated. This study can be utilized in the analysis of the GPRS based data network in the emerging W-CDMA systems
