University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Introduction to Mobile
Communications
Lecturer: Dr. M.Riaz
Department of Electronics and Electrical Systems
The University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus,
Islamabad, PAKISTAN
email: [email protected]

MSC PSTN

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 University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Brief Introduction:
Qualifications
• Ph.D. (Telecommunications Engineering in progress)
Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Islamabad
M.S. (Electronic Engineering)
Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Islamabad
M.Sc. (Electronics)
Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad

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University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Contents
• Telephone history
• Types of radio communication systems
– Cordless
– Paging
– Cellular Mobile

• History of Cellular Mobile Comm. Systems

• Basic Concepts andTerminology in Cellular
Mobile Systems
– Base station, Mobile station, Handoff

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University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Telephone History
• 1876 - Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone.
Elisha Gray files a patent application 3 hours after Bell.
• Over 600 patent suits filed during the next 11 years.
Settled in Bell's favor.
• In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell offered his brand new
patent (No. 174,465) to the Telegraph Company (later
called Western Union) for $100,000.
• The President of the Telegraph Company appointed a
committee to investigate the offer. The offer was accepted.

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University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Telephone History

• Later on, Bell obtained controlling interest

in Western Union by 1882! (only in 6 years
after 1876, the year of his offer)

• There are ~700 million phones in the world

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 University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Telephone Network
SC Switching Center

LT Local Terminal (phone)

1km
Quetta
6 0 0 k m Peshawar
LT
0k m SC
 6 0 SC LT

m
700km  40 0k SC Islamabad
SC
Sialkot
Karachi Lahore SC
SC
WAN
1km 1km Wide
Area
Network
To Other LT Last
Countries LMA Mile
Access
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University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Telephone History

1876 Bell phone 1895 1897

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University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Telephone History

1904 1927 1937

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University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Telephone History

1963 1990 2007 My Office

Australia Phone
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Cordless System

• Cordless telephone (CT) is a

communication system using radio waves to
connect portable handset to a dedicated
fixed port (base station) which is connected
to PSTN as a normal telephone line (using
ordinary telephone numbers)
• CT provides limited range and mobility in
the vicinity of the base station (100 m)
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Cordless Telephone
Public Wireless
Switched link
Telephone
Network 10
(PSTN) 0m
Fixed
Port

Cordless
Handset

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University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Paging

• Paging systems are wireless

communication systems that send brief
messages to a subscriber
• A message is sent to a paging subscriber via
the paging system access number by a
telephone keypad or modem
• The issued message is called a page

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 University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Paging
City 1
Public Landline Link Paging
Switched
Telephone Terminal
Network
City 2
Paging Landline Link Paging
Control
Terminal
Center

City N
Paging
Terminal
Satellite Link
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University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Satellite Communication
System
• In a geostationary satellite system, a message signal is transmitted
from an earth station via an uplink to a satellite, amplified in a
transponder on board the satellite, and then retransmitted via
downlink to another earth station.

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University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Satellite Communication
System
• The most popular frequency band for satellite communications is
6GHz for the uplink and 4GHz for the downlink for the following
reasons:
– Relatively inexpensive microwave equipment
– Low attenuation due to rainfall (primary cause of signal
degradation)
– Insignificant sky background noise (galactic, solar and terrestrial
sources produce low noise in the region 1-10GHz)
• This (6/4GHz) band is used for terrestrial microwave links
• Second generation of satellites use 14/12 GHz band
• 14/12 GHz band requires smaller antennas then 6/4GHz band.

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Satellite Systems Noise Level

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University of Lahore, Islamabad Campus, Pakistan

Cellular Communication
System
• Cellular telephones are personally portable
devices that may be used in motor vehicles
or by pedestrians.
• Communicating by radio-wave in the 800-
900-megahertz band, they permit a
significant degree of mobility within a
defined serving region that may be
hundreds of square kilometers in area.
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Cellular System

MSC PSTN

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Cellular Coverage
• The geographic area served by a cellular radio system is
broken up into smaller geographic areas, or cells.
• Uniform hexagons most frequently are employed to
represent these cells on maps and diagrams;
• in practice, though, radio-waves do not confine themselves
to hexagonal areas, so that the actual cells have irregular
shapes.
• All communication with a mobile or portable instrument
within a given cell is made to the base station that serves
the cell.

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Frequency Reuse
• The transmitting power of battery-operated
portable units is relatively low and the attenuation
of the propagating radio waves is relatively high.
• That gives us the opportunity for the sending and
the receiving frequencies assigned to a cell to be
reused in other (more distant) cells within the
larger geographic area.
• Thus, the spectral efficiency of a cellular system
is increased by a factor equal to the number of
times a frequency may be reused within its service
area.
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Handoff (Handover)
• Usually a mobile unit proceeds from one cell to
another during the course of a call,
• A central controller (mobile telephone switching
office (MTSO)) automatically reroutes the call
from the old cell to the new cell without a
noticeable interruption in the signal reception.
• This process is known as handoff.
• MTSO acts as an intelligent central office switch
that keeps track of the movement of the mobile
subscriber.
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Handoff (Handover)
BS3

BS2

BS1

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Development of Mobile
Telephone Systems.
• In the United States, interconnection of mobile
radio transmitters and receivers (transceivers)
with the PSTN began in 1946, with the
introduction of mobile telephone service (MTS)
by AT&T.
• The MTS system employed frequencies in
either the 35-megahertz band or the 150-
megahertz band.
• A mobile user who wished to place a call from
a radiotelephone had to search manually for
an unused channel before placing the call.

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Mobile Telephone Service

(MTS) by AT&T
• In MTS the user spoke with a mobile
operator, who actually dialed the call
over the PSTN.
• The radio connection was simplex--i.e.,
only one party could speak at a time
• The call direction was controlled by a
push-to-talk switch in the mobile
handset.

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IMTS by AT&T
• In 1964 AT&T introduced a second generation of
mobile telephony, known as improved mobile
telephone service (IMTS).
• IMTS provided:
– 11channels in the 152-158-MHz band,
– full-duplex operation,
– automatic dialing, and
– automatic channel searching.
• 1969 an additional 12 channels were added in the
454-459-MHz band.

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Success of IMTS by AT&T

• Only 11 (or 12) channels were available for all users
of the system within a given geographic area (such as
the metropolitan area around a large city)
• Each frequency was used only once in that area.
• The IMTS system faced a high demand for a very
limited channel resource.
• Example: in New York City during 1976, the IMTS
system served 545 customers.
• 3,700 customers were on a waiting list for the service.
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Drawbacks of IMTS

• In IMTS each base-station antenna was

located on a tall structure and transmitted at
high power in an attempt to provide
coverage throughout the entire service area.
• Because of these high power requirements,
all subscriber mobile units in the IMTS
system were instruments that carried large
batteries.
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Start of AMPS
• During this time the American cellular radio
system, known as the advanced mobile phone
system, or AMPS, was developed primarily by
AT&T and Motorola, Inc.
• AMPS was based on 666 paired voice channels,
spaced every 30 kilohertz in the 800-megahertz
region.
• AMPS system employed an analog-frequency
modulation, and was designed to support both
mobile and portable subscriber units.
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Success of AMPS.
• AMPS was publicly introduced in Chicago in 1983
and was a success from the beginning.
• At the end of the first year of service, there were a
total of 200,000 AMPS subscribers throughout the
United States;
• 1988 there were more than 2,000,000. In response
to this growth, an additional 166 voice channels
were allocated to cellular carriers in each market.
• Still, the cellular system soon experienced capacity
shortages.
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AMPS Improvements
• The American cellular industry responded with
several proposals for increasing capacity without
requiring additional spectrum allocations.
• One analog FM approach, proposed by Motorola
in 1991, was known as narrowband AMPS, or
NAMPS.
• In NAMPS systems each existing 30-kilohertz
voice channel is split into three 10-kilohertz
channels.
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NAMPS and IS-54

• In place of the 832 channels available in AMPS the
NAMPS system offered 2,496 channels.
• A second approach named IS-54 (IS-136),
developed by Telecommunications Industry
Association (TIA) in 1988, employed
– digital modulation
– digital voice compression and
– time-division multiple access (TDMA) method;
• IS-54 permitted also three new voice channels in
place of one AMPS channel

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IS-95
• In 1994 appeared a third approach, developed
originally by Qualcomm, Inc., but also adopted as
a standard IS-95 by the TIA.
• This third approach used a form of spread
spectrum multiple access known as code-division
multiple access (CDMA)--a technique that
combined digital voice compression with digital
modulation.
• The CDMA system offered 10 to 20 times the
capacity of existing AMPS cellular techniques.
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Developments Outside US
• All of these improved capacity cellular systems are
deployed in the United States.
• In Oct. 2000 Telstra, Australia replaced its analog
AMPS network with CDMA IS-95 network.
• AMPS was the first cellular system developed, yet
the first cellular system actually to be deployed was
a Japanese system deployed in 1979.
• Japanese system was followed by the Nordic
mobile telephone (NMT) system, deployed in 1981
in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.
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Need for GSM

• Total access communication system (TACS), was
deployed in the United Kingdom in 1983.
• A number of other cellular systems were developed and
deployed in many more countries in the 80s and 90’s. All
of them were incompatible with one another.
• In 1988 a group of government-owned public telephone
bodies within the European Community announced the
digital global system for mobile (GSM) communications,
• GSM was the first system that would permit a cellular user
in one European country to operate in another European
country with the same equipment.

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Path to 3G Mobile
Communication Systems
• First Major Migration Path
– I Gen, 80’s, ETACS (C-450,NMT-450..), (FDMA), Analog
– II Gen, 90’s, GSM, GPRS, EDGE, (TDMA) Digital
– III Gen, 00’s, W-CDMA , (CDMA), All Digital
• Second Major Migration Path
– I Gen, 80’s, AMPS, (FDMA), Analog
– II Gen, 90’s, IS-54 (TDMA), IS-95 (CDMA), Digital
– III Gen, 00’s, Cdma2000 (CDMA), All Digital

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Path from 2G to 3G Mobile

Communication Systems

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Cellular System

MSC PSTN

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Cellular Telephone System

Structure
• A cellular telephone system consists of:
– Mobile stations (MS)
• Handheld or vehicular
– Base stations (BS)
• Towers supporting several transceivers
– Mobile switching center (MSC) or mobile
telephone switching office (MTSO)
• Activity control of all BS, connects to PSTN

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Cellular System Radio

Interface
• The common air interface (CAI) defines
communication between BS and MS
• Types of channels used in a mobile system:
– Forward voice channel (FVC)
forward
– Forward control channel (FCC)
– Reverse voice channel (RVC)
– Reverse control channel (RCC)
reverse
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Cellular Telephone System

• Forward voice channel (FVC)
– BS to MS voice transmission
• Reverse voice channel (RVC)
– MS to BS voice transmission
• Forward control channel (FCC) and
Reverse control channel (RCC)
– Setting up mobile call and moving it to voice
channel

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Cellular Telephone System

Mobile Switching Center PSTN

(MSC)
coordinates the routing of calls in a large service area.

Base Transceiver Station PSTN : Public Switching Telephone Network

Control Channel
Reverse Reverse * call setting
Forward Forward
Voice Control * call request
Control voice
channel channel * call initiation channel channel
* Transmit voice from * Transmit information * Transmit information * Transmit voice
* other control purpose
mobile unit to BS from mobile unit to BS from BS to mobile unit from BS to mobile unit

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Cellular Telephone Call

• Mobile station (phone) turned on
– it scans for the group of forward control
channels(FCC) to find the one with the
strongest signal
– Monitors that control channel until the signal
drops below usable level
– Again scans for the strongest control channel
• The control channels are defined and
standardized over the entire area
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Call to a Mobile Phone

Receives call from Verifies that the Requests BS to Connects the
MSC PSTN Sends the
MIN to all base
mobile has a valid
MIN, ESN pair
move mobile to
unused voice
mobile with the
calling party on the
stations channel pair PSTN
Transmits data
FCC Transmits page
(MIN) for
message for mobile
to move to voice
specified user channel

Receives MIN,
RCC ESN, Station Class
Mark and passes to
MSC
Base
Begin
Station FVC voice
transmissi
on

Begin
RVC voice
receptio
n

Receives data
FCC Receives page and
matches the MIN message to move to
with its own specified voice
channel

Acknowledges
RCC receipt of MIN and
sends ESN and
Mobile Station Class Mark
Station Begin
FVC voice
receptio
n

Begin
RVC voice
transmissi
on

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Call from a Mobile Phone

Receives call initiation Instructs originating BS to Connects the
MSC request from BS and
verifies that the mobile has
move mobile to a pair of unused
voice channel
mobile with the
called party on the
a valid MIN, ESN pair PSTN
Page message for
FCC calling mobile with
MIN instructing to
move to voice
channel
Receives call
RCC initiation request,
MIN,ESN, number
of called party and
Station Class Mark.
Base
Begin
Station FVC voice
transmissi
on

Begin
RVC voice
receptio
n

Receives page and

FCC matches the MIN
with its own, moves
to voice channel
Sends a call
MIN - Mobile Identification Number
RCC initiation request,
MIN,ESN, SCM ESN - Electronic Serial Number
and the number of
Mobile called party SCM - Station Class Mark

Station Begin
FVC voice
receptio
n

Begin
RVC voice
transmissi
on

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Roaming(1)

• Roaming allows subscribers to operate in

mobile phone service areas other than the
service area where the service is subscribed
• When a mobile enters area outside the home
service area it is registered as roamer in the
new service area
• Since FCC are everywhere the same,
roamer is receiving information from FCC
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Roaming(2)
• Every several minutes MSC issues command over each FCC to all
mobiles previously unregistered to report their MIN and ESN over the
RCC
• Unregistered mobiles periodically report back subscriber information
upon receiving the registration request
• The MSC uses MIN/ESN data to request billing status from the home
location register (HLR)
• If the mobile has roaming authorization at home, MSC registers the
subscriber in a visiting location register (VLR) as a valid roamer
• Once registered roaming mobiles are allowed to receive and place
calls from the new service area
• Billing is routed automatically to the subscribers home service
provider (HLR)

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