1. In your own words, describe the FDMA, TDMA and CDMA.

Frequency division multiple access (FDMA), time division multiple access (TDMA), and code division multiple access (CDMA) are the three major access techniques used to share the available bandwidth in a wireless communication system. Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) Frequency division multiple access (FDMA) assigns individual channels to individual users. It can be seen from Figure 1 that each user is allocated a unique frequency band or channel. These channels are assigned on demand to users who request service. During the period of the call, no other user can share the same frequency band. In FDD systems, the users are assigned a channel as a pair of frequencies; one frequency is used for the forward channel, while the other frequency is used for the reverse channel.

Figure 1 The features of FDMA are as follows: The FDMA channel carries only one phone circuit at a time. If an FDMA channel is not in use, then it sits idle and cannot be used by other users to increase or share capacity. It is essentially a wasted resource. After the assignment of a voice channel, the base station and the mobile transmit simultaneously and continuously. The bandwidths of FDMA channels are relatively narrow (30 kHz) as each channel supports only one circuit per carrier. That is, FDMA is usually implemented in narrowband systems. The symbol time is large as compared to the average delay spread. This implies that the amount of intersymbol interference is low and, thus, little or no equalization is required in FDMA narrowband systems. The complexity of FDMA mobile systems is lower when compared to TDMA systems, though this is changing as digital signal processing methods improve for TDMA. Since FDMA is a continuous transmission scheme, fewer bits are needed for overhead purposes (such as synchronization and framing bits) as compared to TDMA.

FDMA systems have higher cell site system costs as compared to TDMA systems, because of the single channel per carrier design, and the need to use costly bandpass filters to eliminate spurious radiation at the base station. The FDMA mobile unit uses duplexers since both the transmitter and receiver operate at the same time. This results in an increase in the cost of FDMA subscriber units and base stations. FDMA requires tight RF filtering to minimize adjacent channel interference.

The number of channels that can be simultaneously supported in a FDMA system is given by

Where is the total spectrum allocation, is the guard band allocated at the edge of the allocated spectrum, and is the channel bandwidth. Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) Time division multiple access (TDMA) systems divide the radio spectrum into time slots, and in each slot only one user is allowed to either transmit or receive. It can be seen from Figure 2 that each user occupies a cyclically repeating time slot, so a channel may be thought of as particular time slot that reoccurs every frame, where N time slots comprise a frame.

Figure 2 TDMA systems transmit data in a buffer-and-burst method, thus the transmission for any user is non-continuous. This implies that, unlike in FDMA systems which accommodate analog FM, digital data and digital modulation must be used with TDMA. The features of TDMA include the following: TDMA shares a single carrier frequency with several users, where each user makes use of non-overlapping time slots. The number of time slots per frame depends on several factors, such as modulation technique, available bandwidth, etc.

Data transmission for users of a TDMA system is not continuous, but occurs in bursts. This results in low battery consumption, since the subscriber transmitter can be turned off when not in use (which is most of the time). Because of discontinuous transmissions in TDMA, the handoff process is much simpler for a subscriber unit, since it is able to listen for other base stations during idle time slots. An enhanced link control, such as that provided by mobile assisted handoff (MAHO) can be carried out by a subscriber by listening on an idle slot in the TDMA frame. TDMA uses different time slots for transmission and reception, thus duplexers are not required. Even if FDD is used, a switch rather than a duplexer inside the subscriber unit is all that is required to switch between transmitter and receiver using TDMA. Adaptive equalization is usually necessary in TDMA systems, since the transmission rates are generally very high as compared to FDMA channels. In TDMA, the guard time should be minimized. If the transmitted signal at the edges of a time slot are suppressed sharply in order to shorten the guard time, the transmitted spectrum will expand and cause interference to adjacent channels. High synchronization overhead is required in TDMA systems because of burst transmissions. TDMA transmissions are slotted, and this requires the receivers to be synchronized for each data burst. In addition, guard slots are necessary to separate users, and this results in the TDMA systems having larger overheads as compared to FDMA. TDMA has an advantage in that it is possible to allocate different numbers of time slots per frame to different users. Thus bandwidth can be supplied on demand to different users by concatenating or reassigning time slots based on priority. is given as ( ) is the total number of bits

The frame efficiency,

where is the number of overhead bits per frame and per frame.

The number of TDMA channel slots that can be provided in a TDMA system is found by multiplying the number of TDMA slots per channel by the number of channels available and is given by ( )

where is maximum number of TDMA users supported on each radio channel, is total spectrum allocation, is the guard band allocated at the edge of allocated spectrum and is the channel bandwidth.

Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) In code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, the narrowband message signal is multiplied by a very large bandwidth signal called the spreading signal. The spreading signal is a pseudo-noise code sequence that has a chip rate which is orders of magnitudes greater than the data rate of the message. All users in a CDMA system, as seen from Figure 3, use the same carrier frequency and may transmit simultaneously. Each user has its own pseudorandom codeword which is approximately orthogonal to all other codewords. The receiver performs a time correlation operation to detect only the specific desired codeword. All other codewords appear as noise due to de-correlation. For detection of the message signal, the receiver needs to know the codeword used by the transmitter. Each user operates independently with no knowledge of the other users.

Figure 3 The features of CDMA including the following: Many users of a CDMA system share the same frequency. Either TDD or FDD may be used. Unlike TDMA or FDMA, CDMA has a soft capacity limit. Increasing the number of users in a CIJMA system raises the noise floor in a linear manner. Thus, there is no absolute limit on the number of users in CDMA. Rather, the system performance gradually degrades for all users as the number of users is increased, and improves as the number of users is decreased. Multipath fading may be substantially reduced because the signal is spread over a large spectrum. If the spread spectrum bandwidth is greater than the coherence bandwidth of the channel, the inherent frequency diversity will mitigate the effects of small-scale fading. Channel data rates are very high in CDMA systems. Consequently, the symbol (chip) duration is very short and usually much less than the channel delay spread. Since PN sequences have low autocorrelation, multipath which is delayed by more than a chip will appear as noise. A RAKE receiver can be

used to improve reception by collecting time delayed versions of the required signal. Since CDMA uses co-channel cells, it can use macroscopic spatial diversity to provide soft handoff. Soft handoff is performed by the MSC, which can simultaneously monitor a particular user from two or more base stations. The MSC may choose the best version of the signal at any time without switching frequencies. Self-jamming is a problem in CDMA system. Self-jamming arises from the fact that the spreading sequences of different users are not exactly orthogonal, hence in the dispreading of a particular PN code, non-zero contributions to the receiver decision statistic for a desired user arise from the transmissions of other users in the system. The near-far problem occurs at a CDMA receiver if an undesired user has a high detected power as compared to the desired user.

2. As a telecommunication engineer, you are required to provide consultancy service to a telecommunication service provider on how the profit and QoS are related to the channel allocation in TDMA system. Produce a short report that you will submit to the telecommunication service provider. In TDMA a channel is divided into slots, and these slots are grouped into frames. The payload transmitted in one physical block is referred to as packet, and can span multiple slots as seen in Figure 4. In these systems mobiles can reserve resources (slots) for connections. A QoS manager (typically located on the base-station) receives transmission requests from the mobiles. The key to providing QoS for these connections will be the scheduling algorithm that assigns the bandwidth.

Figure 4 The QoS manager establishes, maintains and releases wireless connections between the base-station and the mobile and also provides support for handover and mobility services. Multimedia networking requires at least a certain minimum QoS and bandwidth allocation for satisfactory application performance. This minimum QoS requirement has a wide dynamic range depending on the users quality expectations, application usage modes, and applications tolerance to degradation. In addition, some applications can gracefully adapt to sporadic network congestion while still providing acceptable performance.

The slot scheduler assigns bandwidth for connections. A schedule is broadcast to all mobiles so that they know when they should transmit or receive data. This schedule is called Traffic Control Slot (TCS). The slot scheduler is designed to preserve the admitted connections as much as possible within the negotiated connection QoS parameters. Thus, from this method, the profit can be increased by supplying bandwidth on demand to different users by concatenating or reassigning time slots based on priority as will be done by slot scheduler. This on the other hand maintains the Qos done by Qos manager.