Pule Code Modulation (PCM) While the trend in modern wireless networks is towards data communications, the demand

for voice-related services such as traditional mobile phone calls is expected to continue to exist. Thus voice needs to be converted from its analog form to a digital form that will be transmitted over the digital wireless network. The devices that perform this operation are known as codecs (coder/decoder) and have been used mainly in mobile phones. Codecs aim to convert voice into a digital bit stream that has the lowest possible bit rate while maintaining an acceptable quality. A codec can convert an analog speech signal to its digital representation by sampling the analog signal at regular time intervals. This method is known as Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) and is used in codecs of PSTN and CD systems. There is a direct relationship between the number of samples per second, W, and the width, H, of the analog signal we want to digitize. This is given in the following equation, which tells us that when we want to digitize an analog signal of width, H, there is no point in sampling faster than W: W = 2H bps The process of PCM conversion of an analog signal to a digital one comprises three stages: Sampling of the analog signal. This produces a series of samples, known as Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM) pulses, with amplitude proportional to the original signal. The PAM pulses produced after sampling of an analog signal are shown in Figure 2.14.

Quantizing. This is essentially the splitting of the effective amplitude range of the analog signal to V levels which are used for approximating the PAM pulses. These V levels (known as quantizing levels) are selected as the median values between various equally spaced signal levels. The quantization of the PAM pulses of Figure 2.14 is shown in Figure 2.15. Quantization obviously distorts the original signal since some information is lost due to approximation. The more the quantizing levels, the less the distortion since the approximation

with many levels is more precise. Good voice digitization by PCM is achieved for 128 quantization levels. The distortion due to quantization is known as quantizing noise and is given by the following formula [5]: S/N = 6V + 1.8 Db

Binary encoding. This is encoding of the quantized values of PAM to binary format, which forms the output of the PCM system and will be used to modulate the signal to be transmitted. For the quantized PAM pulses of Figure 2.15 four bits are used per PCM sample coding (since nine levels can be encoded by four bits) the binary output is 0110011001000011010001111001100 00011. PCM demands relatively high bit rates and is thus not very useful for wireless communications systems such as mobile phones. Differential PCM (DPCM) outputs the binary representation of the difference between consecutive PCM samples rather than the samples themselves. When x bits are used for encoding the differences, the method is known as x-bit DPCM. DPCM schemes obviously reduce the bit rate produced if the differences between samples can be encoded using less bits than those required for encoding the actual samples. However, DPCM techniques have poor performance when steep changes occur in the analog signal Adaptive DPCM (ADPCM) tries to predict the value of a sample based on previous sample values. ADPCM helps reduce the bit rate down to 16 kbps while still maintaining acceptable voice quality. Delta modulation is a form of DPCM which uses one bit per sample.

GSM
The primary service supported by GSM is voice telephony. Speech is digitally encoded and

transmitted through the GSM network as a binary bitstream. GSM also offers a variety of data services. It allows users to send and receive data. GSM also supports the Short Message Service (SMS) and Cell Broadcast Service (CBS). Finally, GSM supports a number of additional services, such as call forward (call forwarding when the mobile subscriber is unreachable by the network), call barring of outgoing or incoming calls, caller identification, call waiting, multiparty conversations, etc. Network Architecture A GSM network comprises several functional entities. Figure 4.6 shows the layout of a GSM network..

Mobile Station (MS) The MS consists of the terminal (TE) and a smart card called the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM). The SIM provides personal mobility, so that the user can have access to subscribed services irrespective of a specific terminal. Furthermore, the SIM card is the actual place where the GSM network finds the telephone number of the user. Thus, by inserting the SIM card into another GSM terminal, the user is able to use the new terminal to receive calls, make calls and user other subscribed services while using the same telephone number. The actual GSM terminal is uniquely identified by the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI). The SIM card contains the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) used to identify the subscriber to the system, a secret key for authentication, and other information. Base Station Subsystem (BSS) The BSS contains the necessary hardware and software to enable and control the radio links with the MSs. It comprises two parts, the Base Station (BS) and the Base Station Controller (BSC). These communicate across the standardized Abis interface. The BS contains the

radio transceivers that define a cell and handles the radio-link protocols with the MS. In a large urban area, there will potentially be a large number of BSs deployed, thus the BSC typically manages the radio resources for one or more cells. BSs are responsible for frequency administrations and handovers. The BSC is the connection between the mobile station and the Mobile service Switching Center (MSC). Network Subsystem The central component of the network subsystem is the Mobile Switching Center (MSC). The MSC performs switching of user calls and provides the necessary functionality to handle mobile subscribers. This functionality includes support for registration, authentication, location updating, handovers, and call routing to a roaming subscriber. Furthermore, the MSC interfaces the GSM network to fixed networks. Such an MSC is known as a Gateway MSC (GMSC) and performs the necessary interworking functions (IWF) to interface the GSM network to a fixed network such as the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) or ISDN. Signaling between functional entities in the network subsystem uses Signaling System Number 7 (SS7), which is widely used in public networks.