DCIT428: Wireless Systems

Lecturer: Prof. F. Apietu Katsriku

Office Hours: Mondayday 11:00 – 14:00 Hrs
[email protected]
Computer Science Department
University of Ghana

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 Principles of Wireless and Mobile Systems: Background

What is wireless?
•The physical phenomena known as radio waves were first known as
‘Hertzian Waves’. Hertz showed that the electromagnetic phenomena
(under study by Tesla) could be used to transfer energy between
locations without a physical connection.
•Guglielmo Marconi began work in 1894 to reproduce the Hertz
laboratory experiment over greater distances. His study and efforts
brought about the first radio link in the form of wireless telegraph.
•The combined works of Tesla, Hertz, and Marconi proved that
electromagnetic phenomena (such as a large spark) generated at
one location could be detected at another location without a direct
physical connection between locations. Thus, the ability to
communicate without wires i.e. ‘Wireless’.
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Wireless Networks: Why?

Mobility
Minimise required infrastructure
Disaster recovery
Long distance, low data rate links

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Principles of Wireless and Mobile Systems: Key Concepts

• Wireless links inherently are more complex than wireline links

• Wireless links suffer from unfavorable channel characteristics

• There is a very limited spectrum for wireless communication

• Wireless communication is susceptible to intercept

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Key questions

 How can we provide connectivity for mobile

systems?
 What kind of network structure do we need to
support wireless mobility?
 What changes might we need to make to the
existing infrastructure (mechanisms and systems) to
support wireless mobility?

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 Supporting wireless and mobile systems
•Connectivity
•transmission
•modulation
•media access
•Support in the network infrastructure
•connectivity between the wireless
and the wired world
•Protocols
•specifically for dealing with mobility
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•Mobile systems are designed to operate over a very large area
with a limited bandwidth
•A cellular mobile comms. system uses a large number of low-
power wireless transmitters to create cells
•Offers larger capacity through cell splitting

•Variable power levels allow cells to be sized according to

subscriber density& demand within a particular region

•As mobile users travel from cell to cell their conversations are
handed off between cells

•Channels (frequencies) used in one cell can be reused in another

cell some distance away 7
Mobile Radio Environment

Propagation Path Loss

Multipath Fading
Frequency-Selective Fading
Doppler Shift
Co-Channel Interference
Adjacent Channel Interference
Man-Made Noise
Urban Environment
Suburban Environment
Rural Environment

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Communication Systems
• Systems communicate in order to share
information.
• To communicate means to pass information from
one place to another.
• The role of a communication system is the
distribution of information from one location to
another
• It is more convenient to convert information into
a signal. Your concern as a communication
engineer is with the transmission and reception of
these signals.
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Communication Process

• Generation of message signal

– Voice, music, picture or computer data
• The description of message signal
– Electrical, aural or visual
• Coding of signal in form suitable for transmission
• Transmission of encoded signal
• Decoding and reproduction of original signal
• Recreation of original message signal

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Components of communication System
• The basic elements of a communication
system are
– Transmitter
– Channel
– Receiver
• Block diagram of communication system
Source Transmitter Channel Receiver Destination
(distortion)

Noise

F Apietu 11
Katsriku/CSCD609/Sem1/2014_15
Communication Channel
• This is the medium across which transmission
takes place.
• Depending on the mode of transmission two
groups can be identified:
– Guided propagation
• Telephone, coaxial cables and optical fibres
– Free propagation
• Wireless broadcast channels, mobile radio channels
– In this course we are interested in Free propagation

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DCIT 428: Cellular system infrastructure
Early Mobile Systems
Traditional mobile service was structured in a fashion
similar to television broadcasting
One very powerful transmitter located at the highest
spot would cover an area with a radius of up to 50 km

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DCIT 428 : Cellular system infrastructure
Cellular concept re-structured the mobile telephone
network in a different way:

Using low power transmitters to cover larger area.

E.g. dividing a metropolitan region into 100 different
cells 12 channels each

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Cellular system infrastructure
• MS – Mobile station BS – Base station
• BSC – Base station controller MSC – Mobile switching centre
• PSTN – Public switched telephone network
PSTN

MSC MSC

BSC BSC
BSC BSC

cell cell cell cell cell cell cell cell

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Base Station
• FCC – Forward (downlink) control channel
• RCC – Reverse (uplink) control channel
• FTC – Forward (downlink) traffic channel
• RTC – Reverse (uplink) traffic channel

FCC

RCC
FTC

RTC
BTS – Base transceiver system

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Components of a cellular system

• Mobile station/unit
• Base station
• Mobile switching center

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Generic Mobile Unit

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Generic Base Station

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Modulation
• This is the process of transferring information signal to a
high frequency carrier.
• Why Modulate?

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Why Modulate?
Calculate the antenna length required for the reception
of an audio signal if it is known that the antenna length
is 1/4 the wavelength.

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Why Modulate?
• Ability to transmit huge amount of
information using a single carrier frequency
• Increase the transmission length
• Multiplexing
• Shorter aerial length
• Security
• Quality of service

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Modulation
• This is the process of transferring information signal to a
high frequency carrier.
• This process may be classified into
– Continues wave modulation (cw)
– Pulse wave modulation
• In cw depending on the parameter of the high frequency
carrier that is modified the following forms can be
identified
– Amplitude modulation
– Frequency modulation
– Phase modulation

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Modulation
• Pulse modulation uses periodic sequence of rectangular
pulses. This process can either be
– Analogue or digital
• In Analogue pulse modulation the following can be
identified
– Pulse Amplitude
– Pulse Position
– Pulse duration
• The standard form of digital pulse modulation is pulse
code modulation

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Modulation
• A signal is a single valued function of time.
• Can also be expressed as a function of frequency Signal
consists of components of different frequencies
• It can be one dimensional
– Speech
– Music or
– Computer data
• It can be two dimensional-Pictures
• It can be three dimensional -Video data
• Four dimensional
– As in volume data over time

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 Channel Capacity
• A variety of impairments can distort a signal.
• How do these impairments limit the data rate?

• The maximum rate at which data can be

transmitted over a given communication path
or channel under specified conditions, is known
as the Channel Capacity.

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 Channel Capacity
• Data rate
– Number of bits transmitted per second. It indicates how
fast a signal can be transmitted reliably over the given
medium.
Factors affecting Data rate
1. The amount of energy put into transmitting each signal
2. Distance to be travelled
3. Noise
4. Channel Bandwidth

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 Channel Capacity
• Bandwidth
– The bandwidth of a media is the range of
frequencies that can pass through that
medium.
– The bandwidth of the signal is the range of
frequencies that signal carries.

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 Channel Capacity
• Noise
– Noise is an unwanted signal which
interferes with the original message
signal and corrupts the parameters of
the message signal.

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 Channel Capacity
• Error rate
– a measure of the degree of prediction
error of a model made with respect to
the true model.
– The bit error rate is calculated by dividing
the quantity of bits received in error by
the total number of bits transmitted
within the same time period

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Channel Capacity

• Nyquist Bandwidth (noise free)

– C = 2B log M
2

• Shannon Capacity
• C = B log (1+SNR)
2

– C is the channel capacity

– B is the bandwidth of the channel in Hz
– SNR (dB) = 10 log(signal power/noise power)

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 Random Processes and Probability

• Many factors influence the performance of a wireless and

mobile networking system
– The density of MS in a cell
– Distribution of speed and direction of MS
– Frequency of calls
– Number of simultaneous calls
– Duration of calls
– Position of MS with respect to each other and BS
– Type of traffic real-time or non-real-time
– Traffic in adjacent cells and frequency of handoff

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 Random Processes and Probability

• Mathematical models
– Deterministic
– Stochastic
• Communication System the received signal
– Information bearing signal
– Interference
– Channel noise

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