Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM)

The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) system is a global digital radio system that uses Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) technology. GSM is a digital cellular technology that was initially created to provide a single-standard pan-European cellular system. GSM began development in 1982, and the first commercial GSM digital cellular system was activated in 1991. GSM technology has evolved to be used in a variety of systems and frequencies (900 MHz, 1800 MHz and 1900 MHz) including Personal Communications Services (PCS) in North America and Personal Communications Network (PCN) systems throughout the world. By the middle of 2003, 510 networks in 200 countries offered GSM service (Fig: 1).

Fig 1: GSM Network

The GSM system is a digital-only system and was not designed to be backward-compatible with the established analog systems. The GSM radio band is shared temporarily with analog cellular systems in some European nations.

When communicating in a GSM system, users can operate on the same radio channel simultaneously by sharing time slots. The GSM cellular system allows 8 mobile telephones to share a single 200 kHz bandwidth radio carrier waveform for voice or data communications. To allow duplex operation, GSM voice communication is conducted on two 200 kHz wide carrier frequency waveforms.

The GSM system has several types of control channels that carry system and paging information, and coordinates access like the control channels on analog systems. The GSM digital control channels have many more capabilities than analog control channels such as broadcast message paging, extended sleep mode, and others. Because the GSM control channels use only a portion (one or more slots), they typically co-exist on a single radio channel with other time slots that are used for voice communication.

A GSM carrier transmits at a bit rate of 270 kbps, but a single GSM digital radio channel or time slot is capable of transferring only 1/8th of that, about 33 kbps of information (actually less than that, due to the use of some bit time for non-information purposes such as synchronization bits).

Time intervals on full rate GSM channels are divided into frames with 8 time slots on two different radio frequencies. One frequency is for transmitting from the mobile telephone; the other is for receiving to the mobile telephone. During a voice conversation at the mobile set, one time slot period is dedicated for transmitting, one for receiving, and six remain idle. The mobile telephone uses some of the idle time slots to measure the signal strength of surrounding cell carrier frequencies in preparation for handover.

On the 900 MHz band, GSM digital radio channels transmit on one frequency and receive on another frequency 45 MHz higher, but not at the same time. On the 1.9 GHz band, the difference between transmit and receive frequencies is 80 MHz. The mobile telephone receives a burst of data on one frequency, then transmits a burst on another frequency, and then measures the signal strength of at least one adjacent cell, before repeating the process.