The GSM Air Interface

Fundamentals and Protocols

Dr.-Ing. Andreas Willig

Communication Networks Group

Hasso-Plattner-Institute
University of Potsdam

[email protected]

May 20, 2003

Andreas Willig

Resources

• Most of the materials in the following slides is from:

– The books of Bernhard Walke [3]
– The book of Rappaport [1]
– The book of Stallings [2]

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols

Andreas Willig Overview

Overview

• Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

• Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error

Control

• GSM Channel Access Procedure

• GSM Speech Transmission

• Summary

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

• Cellular systems offer location-independent voice communications:

– users can move freely while talking
– they can place calls at any time and any place
– they can be called everywhere

• GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications):

– CEPT initiated work in 1982, ETSI issued the standards in 1990
– digital system, primarily for voice, data services on top (GPRS)

• There are other (old and new) cellular systems: AMPS, IS-136, IS-95,
UMTS (upcoming), TFTS, PDC (Japan), . . .

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 3

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

Fundamentals of Cellular Systems

• A BS constitutes a cell by its transmission radius

• A mobile equipment (e.g. a cellphone) always communicate with the

closest base station (BS)

• The BS’s are spreaded over the area to provide full coverage

• Multiple BS are aggregated in a mobile switching center (MSC)

• The MSC’s are interconnected by a backbone

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 4

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

Fundamentals of Cellular Systems II

Mobile’s
trajectory

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 5

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

Fundamentals of Cellular Systems III

• The overall cellular system is granted some part of the spectrum, which
is subdivided into channels

• Each BS is assigned a (sub-)set of channels to serve mobiles

• Neighboring BS’s are assigned different sets of channels to avoid

interference

• The same channel could be re-used by another base station having

sufficient distance to avoid interference ( =⇒ frequency reuse)

• Moving mobiles will occasionally leave the transmission range of one BS

to enter the range of another =⇒ handover

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 6

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

Fundamentals of Cellular Systems IV

• During a call a BS assigns a fixed portion of a slot to a mobile:

– mobiles arriving to a “full” BS will get no service
– Reducing cell size / transmission power while increasing the number
of BS:
∗ increases the system capacity
∗ increases the number of handovers

• Handover is initiated by the mobile, which has to constantly check the

signal levels of surrounding BS

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 7

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

Fundamentals of Cellular Systems V

• There are different channel assignment strategies:

– fixed assignment: each BS is allocated a fixed set of frequencies and
allocation does not change over time
– fixed assignment with borrowing: before a call is blocked, a BS might
try to “borrow” a channel from a neighboring BS
– dynamic assignment: MSC keeps all channels and allocates them on
request to a BS

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 8

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

Fundamentals of Cellular Systems VI

• How to cope with handovers?

– treat a handover as a new call =⇒ blocking =⇒ connection drop
=⇒ angry users
– guard channel concept: set aside some channels for handover calls
=⇒ wasted capacity
– queueing off handovers: between initiation of handover and the actual
event some time passes (in GSM: 1-2 seconds), this time can be used
to wait for ending / leaving calls, the waiting call is then treated next
– Umbrella cells for highly mobile users

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 9

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

GSM as a Cellular System

• In GSM the structure and terminology is a bit different:

– mobile stations (MS)
– base transceiver station (BTS): has transmit / receive circuitry and
does transcoding / rate-adaptation
– several BTS are managed by a base station controller (BSC): BSC
allocates channels to BTS, handover management, paging
– several BSC’s are under control of a mobile services switching centre
(MSC): gateway to PSTN, handover,

• These are only the “close-to-radio” elements

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 10

Andreas Willig Overview

Overview

• Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

• Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error

Control

• GSM Channel Access Procedure

• GSM Speech Transmission

• Summary

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

• Information is transmitted wire-less between transmitter (Tx) and

receiver (Rx), using electromagnetic waves propagating in free space

• Both Rx and Tx have an antenna

• Frequency bands:
– radio frequencies up to millimeter waves, typically ≤ 5 GHz, but 60
GHz systems under development
– infrared

• In radio and millimeter range frequencies are shared resources, allocation

by regulation bodies, e.g. FCC, CEPT

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 12

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Propagation Phenomena

• Path loss and attenuation on obstacles

• reflection, diffraction, scattering

• interference (adjacent or co-channel)

• thermal or man-made noise

• Imperfections of transmit / receive circuitry

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 13

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Path Loss
The path loss can be modeled approximately as ([3, Eq. 2.8])
 γ
d0
PR ∼ PT · C · (d ≥ d0)
d

• PR and PT are the power levels at Rx and Tx

• C is a constant involving wave length, antenna gains, further

technological parameters

• d0 is the far field distance of the transmit antenna, d is the distance

between Tx and Rx

• γ varies between 2 (free space propagation) and 5 (strong attenuation,

e.g. due to obstacles)

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 14

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Path Loss – Consequences

• A receiver needs a minimum signal power (receive threshold) =⇒ for

fixed PT the communication distance between Tx and Rx is bounded

• Conversely, if two stations A and B have a large distance, they need

high transmit powers to communicate successfully

• If stations A and B both transmit to C and dist(A, C) 6= dist(B, C)

then A’s and B’s signals have different levels at C

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 15

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Path Loss – Consequences Cont’d

• In addition to “normal” path loss, signals can be attenuated on obstacles

• If a receiver moves, passing obstacles leads to variation in the mean

received signal power

• Signal power variation happens on timescales related to human activity

=⇒ slow fading

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 16

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Multipath Fading

• A signal can be transmitted on multiple paths from Tx to Rx due to

– reflection
– diffraction
– scattering

Rx

Tx

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 17

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Multipath Fading – First Consequences

• Result: a signal arrives on several paths, each having a different delay

and attenuation =⇒ delay spread

• Interference (destructive or constructive)

• Inter-Symbol Interference: if channel symbols are transmitted without

guard time, waveforms belonging to different symbols may overlap (due
to delay spread)

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 18

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Multipath Fading – Delay Spread

Figure 1: (From: [1, Chapter 5])

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 19

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Multipath Fading – Mobility

• Mobility of Rx introduces some problems:

– Doppler shift
– varying propagation environment (number of paths, their delay and
relative attenuation)

• We get a rapidly fluctuating received power level =⇒ fast fading or

multipath fading

• If the signal power level sinks below a certain threshold, the receiver
cannot decode the signal

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 20

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Multipath Fading – Example

Figure 2: (From: [1, Chapter 5])

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 21

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Noise and Interference

• Interference sources:
– co-channel interference: other stations sending on the same channel
– adjacent-channel interference: other stations sending on neighbored
channels (leakage due to imperfect filters)
– other devices: microwave ovens, city train power electronics, . . .

• Thermal noise is introduced in transmitter and receiver electronics, and

background radiation

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 22

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

All this Translates into Channel Errors ...

• The “error rate” depends on:

– transmitted energy per bit (lower for “faster” modulation schemes)
– received signal power (influenced by distance/path loss, multipath
fading)
– interference + noise

• rules of thumb about errors on wireless channels:

– higher / faster modulation schemes have higher error rates
– errors tend to occur in bursts
– overall error rates can be quite high: 10−2 . . . 10−3

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 23

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Some Countermeasures / Error Control

• open-loop vs. closed-loop error control:

– In open loop schemes the transmitter adds some amount of redundancy
to the data but gets no feedback from the receiver about the
transmission outcome
∗ equalization
∗ forward error correction / Interleaving
∗ multiple packets
– in closed loop approaches the transmitter may also use redundancy, but
receives feedback (acknowledgements) and performs retransmissions
(maybe adapting the amount of redundancy) – ARQ protocols

• For delay-critical speech data open loop schemes are preferred

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 24

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Some Countermeasures / Error Control II

• Equalization: send some “well-known” training sequence, let the receiver

figure out the specific pattern of distortion (“learn about the channel”)
and use this to infer proper corrections which are applied to the remaining
user data

• error-correcting codes (forward error correction, FEC): for k bits of user

data add n − k redundancy bits and transmit n bits (the fraction k/n is
called code rate), such that:
– bit errors can be detected
– a limited amount of bit errors can be corrected
Most FEC schemes work best when bit errors occur independently

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 25

Andreas Willig Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error Control

Some Countermeasures / Error Control III

• Interleaving: user data blocks are “shuffled” before transmission and

“deshuffled” after reception and before FEC decoding. Hopefully bursty
error patterns are translated into “independently looking” ones

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 26

Andreas Willig Overview

Overview

• Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

• Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error

Control

• GSM Channel Access Procedure

• GSM Speech Transmission

• Summary

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols

Andreas Willig GSM Channel Access Procedure

GSM Channel Access Procedure

• Basic problem of multiple access schemes:

To let a number of stations share a common resource (namely, the
transmission medium / channels) in an efficient manner and such
that some desired performance objectives are met.
Analogy: how to distribute speech rights among 100 people in a room?

• Example performance objectives:

– fairness
– low delay in case of low load
– high throughput in case of high load
– reasonable overhead
– stability

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 28

Andreas Willig GSM Channel Access Procedure

Basic Multiple Access Schemes

• More than 30 years research in multiple access control (MAC) protocols

• One possible classification is the following:

– random access protocols: (slotted) ALOHA, CSMA, CSMA/CD,
CSMA/CA, . . .
– fixed assignment protocols: TDMA, FDMA, CDMA, SDMA
– demand assignment protocols:
∗ centralized: polling protocols, reservation protocols
∗ decentralized: token passing protocols

• GSM uses a combination of TDMA, FDMA and random access

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 29

Andreas Willig GSM Channel Access Procedure

FDMA - Frequency Division Multiple Access

• Basic idea: the overall frequency band is subdivided into equal-sized

channels, which can be used simultaneously

• Channels are separated by some guard bands to reduce adjacent-channel

interference

• A channel is assigned exclusively to two stations / a set of stations; in

the GSM context: to a BTS

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 30

Andreas Willig GSM Channel Access Procedure

GSM FDMA Structure

Uplink Downlink
890 915 935 960

Channels: 1 2 3 124

200 kHz

Figure 3: (from: [3, p.138])

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 31

Andreas Willig GSM Channel Access Procedure

GSM FDMA Structure

• Two 25 MHz wide frequency bands are assigned for GSM in Europe,
used in frequency division duplex (FDD) mode:
– 890 to 915 MHz: uplink (mobile to BTS)
– 935 to 960 MHz: downlink (BTS to mobile)
Extension bands are planned

• Channels 1 and 124 should not be used to protect neighboring bands

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 32

Andreas Willig GSM Channel Access Procedure

TDMA - Time Division Multiple Access

• Operates on a single channel

• All stations have to be synchronized

• time is divided into superframes of fixed length, a superframe is divided

into a number of slots

• guard bands are needed to compensate for different propagation delays

• In GSM the TDMA approach is applied to uplink and downlink channels

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 33

Andreas Willig GSM Channel Access Procedure

GSM TDMA Frame Structure

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

data bits Training data bits

57 bits 26 bits 57 bits

3 1 1 3

burst 148 bit

slot 156.25 bit, 0.577 ms

Figure 4: Structure of Normal Bursts (from: [3, p.139])

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 34

Andreas Willig GSM Channel Access Procedure

GSM TDMA Frame Structure II

• the modulation scheme used in a slot (GMSK – Gaussian Minimum Shift

Keying) has a raw bit rate of ≈ 270 kBit/s

• The training bits are used for equalization

• the data in a slot is called a burst of 148 bits length, not all bursts have
the structure shown in the Figure; The remaining 8.25 bits are guard
time

• The tail bits / start-stop bits are constant

• If a user owns one slot, he gets a maximum bit rate of 24.7 kBit/s
(without any error correction)

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 35

Andreas Willig GSM Channel Access Procedure

GSM Physical and Logical Channels

• A physical channel is specified by a specific time slot in a specific channel

/ carrier frequency

• logical channels:
– run over a physical channel, but not necessarily in all its time slots
– are classified into traffic channels and control channels
– have to be managed: set up, maintenance, tear down

• control channels are interspersed with traffic channels in well-specified

ways (e.g. every 26 TDMA frames a logical channel gets bandwidth in a
physical channel)

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 36

Andreas Willig GSM Channel Access Procedure

Traffic Channels

• Bm channel or full rate channels offer a data rate of 22.8 kBit/s:

– speech data: used as 13 kBit/s voice data plus FEC data
– packet data: used as 12, 6, or 3.6 kBit/s plus FEC data

• Lm channel or half rate channels offer 11.4 kBit/s:

– speech data: improved codecs have rates of ≈ 6.5 kBit/s, plus FEC
– packet data: can be transmitted at 3 or 6 kBit/s

• Two half rate channels can share one physical channel

• Consequence: to achieve higher packet data rates, multiple logical

channels have to be allocated =⇒ this is what GPRS does

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 37

Andreas Willig GSM Channel Access Procedure

Control Channels

• Broadcast logical channel:

– is subdivided into several subchannels
– BTS announces network specific data like:
∗ network identification / operator
∗ availability of options like voice activity detection etc.
∗ frequencies used by the BTS and neighbors
∗ frequency correction / synchronization information

• Paging channel: used only in downlink for handling an incoming call

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 38

Andreas Willig GSM Channel Access Procedure

Control Channels II

• Random access channel: used only in uplink for requesting a connection

establishment (a slotted ALOHA random access protocol is used on this
channel)

• Access grant channel: the BTS informs a mobile about the outcome of
a connection setup request

• There are further control channels, e.g. supporting authentication,

handover

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 39

Andreas Willig Overview

Overview

• Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

• Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error

Control

• GSM Channel Access Procedure

• GSM Speech Transmission

• Summary

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols

Andreas Willig GSM Speech Transmission

GSM Speech Transmission

Speech Speech

Digitizing and Source

Source Coding Decoding

Channel
Channel Coding Decoding

Interleaving De−Interleaving

Ciphering De−Ciphering

Burst Burst
Formatting Formatting

Modulation Demodulation

Radio Channel

Figure 5: Speech Transmission (from: [1, p.564])

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols

Andreas Willig GSM Speech Transmission

GSM Speech Transmission

• Source coding:
– “Residually Excited Linear Predictive Coder” (RELP)
– Coder produces 260 bits every 20 msec (13 kBit/s)
– voice activity detection: no output during silence periods (improves
battery lifetime, reduces interference), comfort noise is generated at
receiver

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 42

Andreas Willig GSM Speech Transmission

GSM Speech Transmission II

• Channel coding:
– output bits of channel coder is sorted into groups according to their
relevance for speech quality
– 3 parity bits are added to the most important 50 bits
– A block of 189 bits is formed from:
∗ the 53 bits from the previous stage
∗ further 132 bits from the speech data (second-highest importance)
∗ four trailing zero bits
– This block is FEC-encoded with a rate 1/2 convolutional coder
– The remaining 78 bits of the 260 bits speech data block enjoy no error
detection / protection
– The overall resulting block has 456 bits
– different coding rules for packet data frames and control frames

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 43

Andreas Willig GSM Speech Transmission

GSM Speech Transmission III

• Interleaving:
– The 456 bits are fragmented into eight blocks of 57 bits size
– These eight blocks are “shuffled” to form eight new blocks
– One shuffled block of the current speech packet and another from the
previous speech packet are written into a normal burst

• Ciphering:
– A shared secret between mobile and BTS is applied to each of the
eight interleaved blocks of a speech packet
– Two different encryption algorithms, changed from call to call

• After interleaving and ciphering the final burst is formatted (adding

headers and trailers)

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 44

Andreas Willig GSM Speech Transmission

GSM Speech Transmission IV

• Modulation: each bit of a formatted burst is translated into a waveform

(specified by the GMSK modulation) and transmitted over the antenna

• On the receiver side all steps are “inverted”, most interesting is the
de-interleaving and channel-decoding step:
– the decoder tolerates one missing 57 bit block
– the least important bits are taken as they are
– after decoding the more important bits an additional check of the 3-bit
checksum is made; if this fails, the whole speech packet is discarded

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 45

Andreas Willig Overview

Overview

• Fundamentals of Cellular Systems and GSM

• Fundamentals of Wireless Channels and Error

Control

• GSM Channel Access Procedure

• GSM Speech Transmission

• Summary

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols

Andreas Willig Summary

Summary

• GSM allows users wire-less service and true mobility

• Mobility is supported by a (hierarchical) cellular concept and handovers

• Bandwidth is a scarce resource

• Capacity is an important issue, interference-limited

• Significant effort is made in GSM to protect speech transmission against

channel errors and eavesdropping

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols, page 47

Andreas Willig Summary

References

[1] Theodore S. Rappaport. Wireless Communications

– Principles and Practice. Prentice Hall, Upper
Saddle River, NJ, USA, 2002.

[2] William Stallings. Wireless Communications and

Networks. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New
Jersey, 2001.

[3] Bernhard Walke. Mobile Radio Networks –

Networking, Protocols and Traffic Performance.
John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, 2002.

GSM Air Interface: Fundamentals and Protocols