0112EC071102 EC-2 (BIST)

EXPERIMENT: 9

OBJECT:
Study data transmission via cellular systems.

INTRODUCTION
A cellular radio system provides a wireless connection to the public telephone network for any
user location within the radio range of the system. The term mobile has traditionally been used to
classify a radio terminal that can be moved during Cellular systems accommodate a large number
of mobile units over a large area within a limited frequency spectrum.

There are several types of radio transmission systems. We consider only full duplex systems.
These are communication systems that allow simultaneous two-way communication.
Transmission and reception for a full duplex system are typically on two different channels, so
the user may constantly transmit while receiving signals from another user. Figure 1.1 shows a
basic cellular system that consists of mobiles, base stations, and a switching center. Each mobile
communicates via radio with one or more base stations. A call from a user can be transferred one
base station to another during the call. The process of transferring is called handoff. Each mobile
contains a transceiver (transmitter and receiver), an antenna, and control circuitry.

The base stations consist of several transmitters and receivers, which simultaneously handle full
duplex communications and generally have towers that support several transmitting and
receiving antennas. The base station connects the simultaneous mobile calls via telephone lines,
microwave links, or fiber-optic cables to the switching center. The switching center coordinates
the activity of all of the base stations and connects the entire cellular system to the public
telephone network. The channels used for transmission from the base station to the mobiles are
called forward or downlink channels, and the channels used for transmission from the mobiles to
the base station are called reverse or uplink channels. The two channels responsible for call
initiation and service request are the forward control channel and reverse control channel.

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Once a call is in progress, the switching center adjusts the transmitted power of the mobile (this
process is called power control1) and changes the channel of the mobile and base station
(handoff) to maintain call quality as the mobile moves in and out of range of a given base station.

FREQUENCY DIVISION AND TIME DIVISION MULTIPLE ACCESS

Multiple access schemes are used to allow many mobile users to share simultaneously a common
bandwidth. As mentioned above, a full duplex communication system typically provides two
distinct bands of frequencies (channels) for every user. The forward band provides traffic from
the base station to the mobile, and the reverse band provides traffic from the mobile to the base
station. Therefore, any duplex channel actually consists of two simplex channels. Frequency
division multiple access (FDMA) and time division multiple access (TDMA) are the two major
access techniques used to share the available bandwidth in a conventional mobile radio
communication systems. Frequency division multiple access assigns individual channels
(frequency bands) to individual users. It can be seen from Figure 1.3 that each user is allocated a
unique frequency band. These bands are assigned on demand to users who request service.
During the period of the call, no other user can share the same frequency band.

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The bandwidths of FDMA channels are relatively narrow (25–30 kHz) as each channel supports
only one call per carrier. That is, FDMA is usually implemented in narrowband systems. If an
FDMA channel is not in use (for example, during pauses in telephone conversation) it sits idle
and cannot be used by other users to increase the system capacity. Time division multiple access
systems divide the transmission time into time
slots, and in each slot only one user is allowed to either transmit or receive. It can be seen from
Figure 1.4 that each user occupies cyclically repeating wording, so a channel may be thought of
as a particular time slot that reoccurs at slotlocations in every frame. Unlike in FDMA systems,
which can accommodate analog frequency modulation (FM), digital data and digital modulation
must be used with TDMA.

TDMA shares a single carrier frequency with several users, where each user makes use of
nonoverlapping time slots. Analogously to FDMA, if a channel is not in use, then the
corresponding time slots sit idle and cannot be used by other users. Data transmission for users
of a TDMA system is not continuous but occurs in bursts. Because of burst transmission,
synchronization overhead is required in TDMA systems. In addition, guard slots are necessary to
separate users. Generally, the complexity of TDMA mobile systems is higher compared
with FDMA systems.

Advantages of TDMA:

There are lots of advantages of TDMA in cellular technologies. It can easily adapt to
transmission of data as well as voice communication. It has an ability to carry 64 kbps to 120
Mbps of data rates. This allows the operator to do services like fax, voice band data, and SMS as
well as bandwidth-intensive application such as multimedia and videoconferencing. Since
TDMA technology separates users according to time, it ensures that there will be no interference
from simultaneous transmissions. It provides users with an extended battery life, since it
transmits only portion of the time during conversations.
Since the cell size grows smaller, it proves to save base station equipment, space and
maintenance. TDMA is the most cost effective technology to convert an analog system to digital.

Disadvantages of TDMA:
One major disadvantage using TDMA technology is that the users has a predefined time slot.
When moving from one cell site to other, if all the time slots in this cell are full the user might be

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disconnected. Likewise, if all the time slots in the cell in which the user is currently in are
already occupied, the user will not receive a dial tone.
Another problem in TDMA is that it is subjected to multipath distortion. To overcome this
distortion, a time limit can be used on the system. Once the time limit is expired the signal is
ignored

CDMA:
CDMA scheme has two concepts, spread spectrum techniques with single user detection and
multi user concepts with joint detection of user signals. In single user detection, all user signals
from the own cell except for the desired one and all user signals from other cells are treated as
noise. Therefore, in this type of CDMA the desired user signal is not only disturbed by
intercellular interference but also by intracellular interference. In joint detection method all user
signals of a cell are simultaneously detected by exploiting a prior knowledge of the used CDMA
codes and the channel impulse response. Thus, in this type of CDMA intracellular interference is
avoided.
CDMA gives the user entire spectrum all of the time. CDMA spread spectrum technology in
which it uses unique spreading codes to spread the baseband data before transmission. The
receiver then dispreads the wanted signal, which is passed through a narrow band pass filter. The
unwanted signals are not dispread and will not be passed through the filter. The codes are a
sequence of zeros and ones produced at a much higher rate of that of the baseband data. The rate
of spreading code is referred to as chip rate.
In a traditional hard handoff, the connection to the current cell is broken and then the connection
to the new cell is made. Since CDMA uses the same frequency, the connection to the new cell
site can be made without breaking the connection of the current cell which is known as soft
handoff. Soft handoff requires less power, which reduces interference and increases capacity.
The network chooses one or more alternative sites that it feels are handoff candidates while a call
is in progress. It simultaneously broadcasts a copy of the call in each of these sites. It can then
choose one of the sites and can move between them whenever it feels like it. This puts the phone
in complete control of the handoff process.

Conclusion:

From the comparisons made above we cannot say that TDMA is better than CDMA or vice
versa. The main advantage of the CDMA is that, in the single detection method it is more
flexible than TDMA or joint detection. CDMA is said to have higher capacity than TDMA. But
in the future GSM can be extended by an optional CDMA component in order to further
increase the capacity. Finally, it does not matter whether which one is better CDMA or TDMA
right now. It can be only found out with the evolution of these technologies. When going for a
cell phone the user should choose the technology according to where they use it. For users who
travel abroad it is better to go with GSM handsets. For the users in United States CDMA is better
than TDMA because of the coverage we can get at rural areas where digital signals cannot be
transmitted.

BANSAL INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY,BHOPAL