Telecommunication and technology

Lecturer 6

GSM
Global System for Mobile communications (GSM: originally from Groupe Spcial Mobile) is the most popular standard for mobile phones in the world. Its promoter, the GSM Association, estimates that 82% of the global mobile market uses the standard. GSM is used by over 3 billion people across more than 212 countries and territories.

GSM
Its ubiquity makes international roaming very common between mobile phone operators, enabling subscribers to use their phones in many parts of the world. GSM differs from its predecessors in that both signalling and speech channels are digital, and thus is considered a second generation (2G) mobile phone system. This has also meant that data communication was easy to build into the system.

GSM
The ubiquity of the GSM standard has been advantageous to both consumers (who benefit from the ability to roam and switch carriers without switching phones) and also to network operators (who can choose equipment from any of the many vendors implementing GSM). GSM also pioneered a low-cost alternative to voice calls, the Short message service (SMS, also called "text messaging"), which is now supported on other mobile standards as well

GSM
GSM is a cellular network, which means that mobile phones connect to it by searching for cells in the immediate vicinity. GSM networks operate in four different frequency ranges.

GSM
Most GSM networks operate in the 900 MHz or 1800 MHz bands. Some countries in the Americas (including Canada and the United States) use the 850 MHz and 1900 MHz bands because the 900 and 1800 MHz frequency bands were already allocated The rarer 400 and 450 MHz frequency bands are assigned in some countries, notably Scandinavia, where these frequencies were previously used for first-generation systems

Base Station Subsystem (BSS)

Base Transceiver Station (BTS) Base Station Controller (BSC)

BSS
The Base Station Subsystem (BSS) is the section of a traditional cellular telephone network which is responsible for handling traffic and signaling between a mobile phone and the Network Switching Subsystem. The BSS carries out transcoding of speech channels, allocation of radio channels to mobile phones, paging, quality management of transmission and reception over the Air interface and many other tasks related to the radio network

BSC
The Base Transceiver Station, or BTS, contains the equipment for transmitting and receiving of radio signals (transceivers), antennas, and equipment for encrypting and decrypting communications with the Base Station Controller (BSC)

BSC
The Base Station Controller (BSC) provides, classically, the intelligence behind the BTSs. Typically a BSC has 10s or even 100s of BTSs under its control. The BSC handles allocation of radio channels, receives measurements from the mobile phones

MSC
The Mobile Switching Center or MSC is the primary service delivery node for GSM, responsible for handling voice calls and SMS as well as other services (such as conference calls, FAX and circuit switched data).

MSC
The MSC sets up and releases the end-toend connection, handles mobility and hand-over requirements during the call and takes care of charging and real time pre-paid account monitoring.

PSTN
The public switched telephone network (PSTN) is the network of the world's public circuit-switched telephone networks, in much the same way that the Internet is the network of the world's public IP-based packet-switched networks. Originally a network of fixed-line analog telephone systems, the PSTN is now almost entirely digital, and now includes mobile as well as fixed telephones.

GPRS
General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a packet oriented Mobile Data Service available to users of Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and IS136 mobile phones. It provides data rates from 56 up to 114 kbit/s.

GPRS
GPRS can be used for services such as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) access, Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), and for Internet communication services such as email and World Wide Web access. GPRS data transfer is typically charged per megabyte of traffic transferred, while data communication via traditional circuit switching is billed per minute of connection time, independent of whether the user actually is utilizing the capacity or is in an idle state.

GPRS
GPRS is a best-effort packet switched service, as opposed to circuit switching, where a certain Quality of Service (QoS) is guaranteed during the connection for nonmobile users.

GPRS
2G cellular systems combined with GPRS is often described as "2.5G", that is, a technology between the second (2G) and third (3G) generations of mobile telephony. It provides moderate speed data transfer, by using unused Time division multiple access (TDMA) channels in, for example, the GSM system.

TDMA
Time division multiple access (TDMA) is a channel access method for shared medium (usually radio) networks. It allows several users to share the same frequency channel by dividing the signal into different timeslots.

TDMA
The users transmit in rapid succession, one after the other, each using his own timeslot. This allows multiple stations to share the same transmission medium (e.g. radio frequency channel) while using only the part of its bandwidth they require.

TDMA
TDMA is used in the digital 2G cellular systems such as Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), IS-136, Personal Digital Cellular (PDC), and in the Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) standard for portable phones. It is also used extensively in satellite systems, and combat-net radio systems. For usage of Dynamic TDMA packet mode communication

TDMA
TDMA is a type of Time-division multiplexing, with the special point that instead of having one transmitter connected to one receiver, there are multiple transmitters. In the case of the uplink from a mobile phone to a base station this becomes particularly difficult because the mobile phone can move around and vary the timing advance required to make its transmission match the gap in transmission from its peers