Comparison of Major Properties of GSM/PCS-1900 With CDMA

GSM-CDMA Comparisons (Nokia Proprietary Information 1999 January 22) page 1 of 64
Comparison of Major Properties of

GSM/PCS-1900 with CDMA
by
Richard C. Levine, Sc. D., P. E.
Principal Consulting Engineer
Beta Scientific Laboratory, Inc.
and
Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering
Southern Methodist University
1999 January 22
Notice: This document contains several trademarked product names,

each of which is the property of the respective trademark holders.
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Table of Contents
Glossary of Terms and Symbols .........................................................................................4
1 Executive Summary:............................................................................................................6
2 Background: ........................................................................................................................7
3 Brief Description of GSM TDMA and IS-95 CDMA Technology:..............................................8
3.1 GSM:................................................................................................................................8
3.2 CDMA (IS-95):..................................................................................................................9
4 Historical Notes Regarding CDMA:....................................................................................14
4.1 Significance (if any) of “Third Generation” (3G) .............................................................15
4.2 Critique of CDMA and IS-95:..........................................................................................16
5 Unsubstantiated GSM Claims:...........................................................................................17
5.1 Supportable GSM Claims:..............................................................................................18
6 Relevant Measures of Capacity and Cost: ........................................................................19
7 Capacity ............................................................................................................................24
7.1 Technological Factors Affecting System Capacity: ........................................................24
7.2 Methods to Further Increase GSM Capacity ...................................................................28
7.2.1 Discontinuous Transmit with Frequency Hopping.....................................................28
7.2.2 Underlay/ Overlay.....................................................................................................30
7.3 CDMA Capacity: ............................................................................................................34
7.4 Tabulated Capacity Estimates: ......................................................................................36
8 Coverage...........................................................................................................................38
8.1 CDMA Coverage:...........................................................................................................38
9 Data Capacity....................................................................................................................39
9.1 Data Protocol Support: ..................................................................................................39
9.2 CDMA Data Capacity .....................................................................................................39
9.3 No CDMA Capacity Advantage for Data Users:.............................................................40
9.4 GSM Data Capacity: Roadmap to higher data rates ......................................................41
10 Quality ...............................................................................................................................41
10.1 GSM Frequency Hopping and IFH .............................................................................41
10.2 CDMA Speech Quality:...............................................................................................42
10.3 CDMA Sensitivity to Intermodulation (IM): ..................................................................43
10.4 CDMA C/(I+n) and Spreading Gain: ...........................................................................43
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10.5 So-called "Graceful Degradation" and "Breathing Cells": ...........................................45

10.6 CDMA Sensitivity to Multipath Delay Spread:.............................................................47
10.7 Error Protection Code Equally Good for CDMA and GSM:.........................................48
11 CDMA Soft Handover: .......................................................................................................48
11.1 Penalties of Soft Handover: .......................................................................................50
12 Implementation & Hardware ..............................................................................................53
12.1 CDMA Technical and Engineering Effort:...................................................................53
12.2 Data Communication and Related Features .................................................................53
12.3 Inherent vs. Specific Implementation Aspects: ...........................................................54
13 WLL Systems: ...................................................................................................................55
14 Costs .................................................................................................................................56
14.1 Higher Cost of Extra CDMA Processing and Link Hardware: .....................................56
14.2 Indirect Inferences Regarding Total Costs .................................................................56
15 Review of Conclusions: .....................................................................................................59
Appendix 1: Frequency Dependence of Fading .......................................................................62
Figures
Figure 1: Simplified CDMA Coder.............................................................................................10
Figure 2: Simplified CDMA decoder .........................................................................................11
Figure 3: CDMA Waveforms.....................................................................................................13
Figure 4: Profitability Comparison of Hypothetical Large and Small Expense Steps................21
Figure 5: Ideal Cell Cluster Illustrations ....................................................................................26
Figure 6: Relationship Between Detector S/N and Radio Channel C/(I+n)...............................27
Figure 7: Approximate Bit Error Rate (BER) vs. C/(I+n) for two GSM Installations ...................27
Figure 8: Example of Overlaid Cells .........................................................................................31
Figure 9: CDMA C/(I+n) for Various Degrees of Interference Correlation.................................44
Figure 10: Cells configured to permit “Breathing,” or conversely, Higher Capacity...................46
Tables
Table 1 Walsh Code Example..................................................................................................12
Table 2: Theoretical and Real System Capacity Comparisons.................................................37
Table 3: Major Comparisons of GSM vs. CDMA.......................................................................59
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Glossary of Terms and Symbols

ADSL Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Loop
AMPS Advanced Mobile Phone Service, a name sometimes used for
North American analog cellular
BER Bit Error Rate, the ratio of erroneous received bits to total received
bits
C Carrier signal strength
CDMA Code Division Multiple Access
cdmaOne Trade name for IS-95 CDMA (Qualcomm)
CDMA2000 Qualcomm proposal for 3G
CDVCC Cellular Digital Verification Color Code (used in IS-136)
Chip (rate) bit rate of PN-PRBS bit stream
DMT Discrete Multi-tone
Downlink base transmit and mobile receive direction
DSI Digital Speech Interpolation
DSS Direct Spread Spectrum
DTx Discontinuous Transmit
EFR Enhanced Full Rate (Speech Coder)
G geographic- spectral capacity, conversations/ (total kHz × system area
GSM Global System for Mobile communication
I Interference (undesired signal) strength
IFH Intelligent Frequency Hopping (Nokia proprietary)
IM Inter-Modulation
ISI Inter-Symbol Interference
IS-136 North American TDMA digital interim standard
IS-88 Narrow Band (analog) North American cellular interim standard
IS-95 CDMA interim standard
IUO Intelligent Underlay/Overlay (Nokia Proprietary)
M The number of cells in a system
MOS Mean Opinion Score (rating 1 to 5 for speech quality)
n Noise (signal) strength
NRZ Non-Return to Zero (bipolar waveform)
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PCS Personal Communication System(s)

PN-PRBS Pseudo Noise- Pseudo Random Bit Stream
RSSI Radio (or Received) Signal Strength Indication
S spectral-economic-geographic performance, given by conversations/
(total kHz × $ equivalent cost × system area)
SIM Subscriber Identity Module
TASI Time Assignment Speech Interpolation
TDMA Time Division Multiple Access
Uplink Mobile transmit and base receive direction
WLL Wireless Local Loop, fixed wireless
3G Third generation cellular and PCS technology proposals
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1 Executive Summary:
CDMA (IS-95) and the GSM technology for cellular/PCS access (such as PCS-1900 in North
America) are compared with regard to coverage and capacity, which both affect the cost per
subscriber, and for applications in both cellular systems with mobility and in wireless local loop
(WLL).
Contrary to the claims of its proponents, CDMA does not have a capacity advantage over fully
developed GSM or other TDMA technologies. Two methods are used in fully developed GSM
systems. First, GSM (utilizing frequency hopping) can exploit the capacity advantage afforded
by silent intervals in speech to increase the system capacity, just as CDMA does. But only
GSM technology can fully exploit the second method, overlay/underlay (tiered cells) for
providing extra channels in high traffic areas. Single frequency installations of IS-95 CDMA
cannot fully exploit this method. Both of these methods increase the capacity by amounts
which are quite significant (typically 20 to 70%) but which give different quantitative
improvements in different installations. Exploitation of silence increases the system capacity by
an amount which is dependent on individual user speech patterns of silence, but has no value
for continuous data or other continuous transmissions. Capacity increases from overlay
methods are site specific as well. The claimed capacity advantage of CDMA installations does
not appear when a fully optimized GSM installation makes proper use of the optional
capabilities of frequency hopping, discontinuous transmission (exploiting silence), and
optimally overlaid cell design. The highest system capacity can be achieved by means of
optimizing a GSM installation, using particularly site-specific adaptive or “intelligent” overlay
methods which are not available in an IS-95 CDMA system. These systems have from 10% to
35% more capacity than CDMA systems, and at lower cost.
Even in its most advantageous capacity configuration, equivalent operating cost per subscriber
is at least 30% (and sometimes as much as 60%) higher for CDMA than GSM for voice or for
data. Part of the economic disadvantage of CDMA arises from greater system complexity. Part
of this cost is due to the excessive size and cost of existing CDMA base station modules vis-à-
vis optimal module sizes in smaller cells. Another part of the high CDMA cost, which cannot be
alleviate by system redesign, is primarily due to excessive hardware, cell to switch digital links,
and operational costs partially related to CDMA soft handover (handoff). In a adequately
provisioned system installation with proper RF cell coverage, seamless handover in TDMA
systems (such as the GSM family of technologies) produces no perceptible gap in
communication and no increased probability of dropping a call in progress, contrary to CDMA
proponents’ claims. We conclude that, on balance, CDMA does not produce better system
performance nor better price/performance ratio in these areas than does GSM.
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Among existing available technologies discussed here, GSM/PCS-1900 technology is

presently a superior economic choice for voice and data systems for mobile and fixed wireless
service, giving a lower cost per subscriber and equal or better quality of service.
GSM has a superior speech CODEC at present, but neither of the two technologies is superior
to the other for data transmission accuracy or capacity. GSM is also ahead at present in data
communications capabilities and as a platform for numerous competitive data processing
applications.
For WLL, which does not require handover, CDMA has the theoretical possibility to achieve
equal or better overall performance, but this theoretical possibility is not realized with existing
IS-95 equipment. Costs are still disproportionately high compared to competitive technologies.
Both CDMA and GSM-based WLL technologies are more expensive than traditional wired
(non-radio) technologies, but GSM/PCS-1900 can be more useful as a transition business
strategy when rapid installation and shared mobile/WLL use is a significant business
consideration. When planning fixed local loop equivalent service with lowest long-term cost,
WLL can be used temporarily for rapid product roll out, and then followed up with a lower cost
technology (such as traditional wire subscriber loops) for the long run.
In the past, the high cost of marketing and promotion disguised the fundamental cost
differences between the base system technologies now operating in the North American PCS
market. Recent pricing changes in the cellular/PCS industry are pointing to a “commodity”
market where price is the most significant selling feature. In that predicted marketing
environment, low cost of technology will become the dominant economic factor in the
profitability of cellular or PCS operation.
2 Background:
Many extreme claims have been made in the ongoing battle of words regarding CDMA versus
other cellular/PCS access technologies such as IS-136 TDMA and GSM/PCS-1900. Many of
the most extreme early claims were based primarily on theoretical considerations or
simulations. These were made in the early 1990s before all the competitive technologies were
installed and working. In many cases the proponents of one access technology reached
conclusions which were diametrically opposite to their opponents – clearly a situation in which
both sides could not be correct! These claims generally come from persons having a vested
interest in only one side of the dispute between the different technologies1. The contradictory
claims require independent analysis by a disinterested expert, and a view of recent
experimental results in the field. This brief document summarizes some of the important
distinctions between GSM (and its North American embodiment, PCS-1900), on the one hand,
2
and CDMA (IS-95) on the other hand .
Although proponents (particularly CDMA proponents) of both technologies have made very few
"official" statements regarding system capacity, knowledge of unpublished actual system
1
The present author has no financial interest in any vendor or operator who uses one of these technologies
exclusively, and has done consulting for vendors and operators who use all the relevant technologies mentioned:
both GSM/PCS-1900 and IS-136 TDMA, and also “cdmaOne” IS-95 CDMA. He has no financial interest in the
outcome of competition between these technologies.
2
We will refer to the "GSM technology" when a particular statement is equally applicable to 900 MHz GSM (used
primarily in Europe, Asia, and Australia), PCS-1900 (used in North America) and DCS-1800 (used in the UK and
some parts of Europe). When a comment applies only to one of these, the specific name will be used.
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capacities have become widespread in the industry, and these unpublished capacities are
quoted here without attribution.
3 Brief Description of GSM TDMA and IS-95 CDMA Technology:
3.1 GSM:
Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA3), is used in GSM technology to multiplex 8 full rate
digitally coded conversations (or channels) on the same modulated carrier frequency. The
radio bandwidth of a GSM technology signal is 200 kHz. Up to 16 channels can be multiplexed
on a carrier using half rate speech coding as well, but this is not widely used today due to
lower speech quality of the presently available half rate speech coder. Further discussions in
this report will consider only GSM family full rate or enhanced full rate speech coders.
Each mobile transmitter in the cell produces a synchronized repeating sequence of radio
transmission bursts. The duration of each burst is called a time slot (546 microseconds for
GSM technology) and the time interval of 8 time slots (a total of 4.615 milliseconds), the
repetition pattern time of the GSM technology, is called a time frame. Each mobile transmitter
transmits a burst during only one assigned time slot of the 8 time slots.
The GSM base receiver receives continuously, and separates the portions of the received
digital bit stream occurring in each time slot so that portion is used for the proper conversation.
The mobile receiver can receive during 7 of the 8 time slots, although only one of these carries
the downlink signal for that particular mobile receiver. The mobile receiver is inactivated during
the one time slot when the mobile set transmits. The two corresponding time slots (transmit
and receive) used at the mobile station for one conversation have the same number label in
the documentation but are physically different time slots, because the number labeling of the
transmit and receive time slots is appropriately time offset. Therefore the GSM mobile set does
not transmit and receive simultaneously, which removes the need for a frequency duplex filter
in the GSM technology mobile set.
The mobile receiver processes the digital information received during its own assigned
conversation time slot. It also scans other assigned radio carrier frequencies during the
remaining 6 receive time slots for the purpose of measuring the signal strength and digital bit
error rate of other nearby base station transmitters. The mobile receiver has the capability of
rapidly and accurately re-tuning to a different carrier frequency during each time slot (so called
“frequency agility”). This capability is important for changing carrier frequencies for handover,
scanning other carrier frequencies, and performing optional frequency hopping. Frequency
hopping is done by changing the carrier frequency used for each time slot of transmission and
reception, during a single conversation, according to a pre-arranged schedule.
The use of mandatory error protection codes and the optional use of frequency hopping allows
GSM technology to operate at a relatively low signal level compared to the ambient
interference level (that is, at a low C/(I+n) ratio), without needing excessive channel bandwidth.
The error protection process also utilizes bit interleaving, which is a process of re-arranging the
time order of the digital bits before transmitting over the radio, and then re-arranging the
received bits in the receiver to put them back in proper consecutive order. The actual process
spreads 114 consecutive data bits over 8 different radio bursts (a total time interval of about 36
3
TDMA technology is the basis of both IS-136 and GSM/PCS-1900 standards. Confusingly, the term TDMA is
sometimes used as a synonym for only IS-136. In this report, TDMA refers to both IS-136 and GSM/PCS-1900.
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milliseconds) and then re-arranges them in their original consecutive order. This does cause
some increase in time delay, but it minimizes the chance of consecutive bit errors in the final
re-arranged bit stream and enhances the performance of other error correction coding, even
though a typical fading pattern causes consecutive bit errors on the radio channel.
The use of optional frequency hopping improves performance (that is, it reduces the BER at a
given level of radio interference) in two ways: 1) reduction in fast fading and 2) reduced
average co-channel interference when used in conjunction with discontinuous transmit. Radio
channel fading occurs at locations where certain multiple radio wave rays, which have been
delayed via different geometrical paths through the air, arrive at the same receiving antenna
location. Consider the special case of only two rays of equal power level, but with one ray
going directly by a straight line path from the transmitter and the other ray delayed more due to
a longer zig-zag geometric path involving reflections. At a location where the carrier frequency
oscillations of the two rays are exactly out of phase (180 degree phase difference), one ray is
pushing the electrons in the antenna up, while the other ray is pushing them down with an
equal but opposite force. As a result, there is a complete radio fade at this location.
Meanwhile, at another location about a quarter wavelength away (the precise distance
depends on the geometric angle between the two radio rays) the two rays are precisely in
phase. This results in a double force on the electrons in the antenna from the combination of
the in-phase electric field from the two rays. Thus the signal strength in a region subject to
fading has many nearby locations having short term received signal strength which are
stronger or weaker than the average received signal strength. As the receiving antenna moves
about in such a multi path radio field, the signal strength is continually changing (experiencing
fast fading).
Because of the double strength electric field at an “in phase” location, the current is also
double, and the received power level is thus 4 times as high (6 dB greater) at this location
compared to the power delivered by a single ray with no multi path conditions. Thus, in this
special case, as we move around from place to place, the power at various locations varies
from zero (a negative infinity dB fade, since the logarithm of zero is negative infinity) to a
maximum of 4 times (6 dB over) the average power level.
In a real multi path situation where more than two rays are present with different amplitudes,
we seldom get exactly a +6dB local maximum, nor do we get such a deep fade because the
total cancellation of multiple rays seldom occurs. Instead we get deep fades which are typically
10 to 20 dB below average received power. Furthermore, with multiple rays arriving from
different directions, the locations of the fades are not precisely a half wavelength apart, but
are randomly distributed with some instances of fades separated by a half wavelength but
some others with larger separations as well. Fading affects both GSM and CDMA.
Both GSM and other technologies are subject to fast fading, and these different system
designs deal with the problem of fading in various ways. All system designs use error
protection codes along with bit interleaving to maximize the effectiveness of the error
protection codes, which work best with isolated bit errors rather than bursts of consecutive bit
errors. The inherent bandwidths of different technology signal waveforms has some
relationship to the sensitivity to fast fading, with wider bandwidth signals somewhat less
affected than narrower bandwidth signals in some case. We will discuss this topic more below.
3.2 CDMA (IS-95):

The modulated carrier frequency in CDMA utilizes approximately a 1.28 MHz bandwidth. The
technique used to multiplex several conversations onto this single carrier by CDMA is called
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direct spread spectrum (DSS) coding. It is implemented by combining the low bit rate (typically
9.6 kb/s in the current commercial “cdmaOne” system) digital bit stream from each speech
coder with a distinct 1.28 Mbit/s pseudo-random high bit rate bit stream (usually called a
pseudo-noise pseudo-random bit stream – PN-PRBS) for each conversation.
The term "pseudo-random" means that the bit pattern appears to be random, like so-called
"white" noise, but in fact it is generated by a deterministic digital structure (such as a re-
circulating feedback shift register) which repeats the bit pattern after a relatively long interval of
time. For purposes of illustration, we will show the two bit streams in the form of non-return-to-
zero (NRZ) bipolar electrical waveforms (having voltages which alternate between +1 and -1
volts) and which are then multiplied with each other. (CdmaOne uses unipolar binary signals.)
A block diagram of a structure designed for this purpose is shown in Figure 1.
In a base transmitter, many different high-bit-rate PN-PRBS bit streams are generated in a
similar way, by multiplying the output bit stream of each digital speech coder from each
conversation channel with a distinct PN-PRBS waveform. Then each of these bit streams is
used to phase modulate the same carrier frequency, and these phase modulated radio signals
are combined. There is also a special PN-PRBS channel which carries setup and call
processing messages, and which has its own particular PN-PRBS encoding bit stream, known
to all the mobile receivers in advance.
Figure 2 illustrates the mechanism of the receiver. To extract one particular channel from the
overall received radio signal, a properly synchronized duplicate of that one channel’s PN-
PRBS bit stream is multiplied with the bipolar waveform from the detector stage of a wide band
radio receiver, and ideally the result is a replica of the original data bit stream.
Figure 3 illustrates the relevant waveforms. For purposes of illustration, we use bit rates of 10
kb/s for the data and 100 kb/s for the PN-PRBS. It is difficult to illustrate the actual 1.28 Mb/s
PN-PRBS bit rates since there would be too many PN-PRBS bits per data bit to distinguish
clearly in a drawing. When these two waveforms, labeled a and b in Figure 3, are multiplied
together, the result is a third bipolar voltage waveform c. Waveform c has the same bit rate as
waveform b, and has a comparable bandwidth (about 100 kHz in the figures or 1.28 MHz in
cdmaOne).
a c
NRZ Data
Stream
e.g. 10 kb/s
coded speech to RF
b transmitter
(using phase
One modulation)
Particular
Other input channels
PN-PRBS
are added at base
system. Only one
channel used in MS.
Figure 1: Simplified CDMA Coder
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Single Broad-
band RF “front
end” receiver d
channel output, should
match a from
Matching transmitter
Synchronized PN
-PRBS a
Receiver has A different channel

multiple output
channel
capability. Another PRBS
MS decodes
desired
channel and etc.
signaling
channels
Figure 2: Simplified CDMA decoder
In the receiver block diagram, Figure 2, a second channel or a third channel (not shown) may
be extracted from the detected radio waveform by multiplying that detector waveform with a
second or third properly synchronized PN-PRBS waveform as well.
In Figure 3, note that 10 bits of the PN-PRBS waveform b occur during each one bit of the
data waveform, a. (In the actual CDMA system the ratio is approximately 128.). The bit rate of
the PN-PRBS stream is sometimes called the CHIP rate, and the PN-PRBS waveform is
sometimes called the CHIP or CHIPPING waveform, since it cuts up or "chips away at" the
data waveform by reversing the polarity of small "chips" of the waveform.
During those intervals where the data waveform voltage is +1, the composite signal c is
identical to the PN-PRBS waveform. During the interval where the data waveform voltage is -1,
the composite waveform c is an inverted replica of the PN-PRBS waveform.4
To understand the decoding action at the receiver, consider the case where the transmitter
generates only one composite waveform. In that simplified example, the transmitted waveform
is just waveform c, with no other channels involved. In that case, multiplying waveform c with a
properly synchronized copy of waveform b (the PN-PRBS waveform) to produce waveform d,
which is, under ideal conditions with no other PN-PRBS codes or noise or interference
present, identical to the original waveform a.
4 4
In the actual structure of a CDMA system, the mathematically equivalent result of combining the data bit stream
and the PN-PRBS bit stream is not done by multiplying bipolar waveforms, but is achieved by performing the
exclusive OR logical function with two uni-polar bit streams.
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In this example there are 10 PN-PRBS bits for each data bit. This implies that we could
theoretically multiplex up to 10 different 10 kb/s data bit streams by using 10 different PN-
PRBS codes (although some of these codes – called "weak codes" – are not useful for various
practical reasons). For optimal performance, the 10 PN-PRBS codes used should be
orthogonal to each other. Two codes are mutually orthogonal to each other if their product
waveform (computed over the 10 bit interval which comprises one data bit value) has an equal
number of +1 and -1 pulses in it. The result of averaging the voltage of such a product
waveform over one data bit time interval is an average voltage of zero volts. One example of
a set of orthogonal binary codes are the Walsh codes. Table 1 shows eight binary Walsh
codes, each having a 8-bit duration:
Table 1 Walsh Code Example

Walsh code sequence number Walsh code binary value
0 11111111
1 10101010
2 11001100
3 10011001
4 11110000
5 10100101
6 11000011
7 10010110
The reader can verify that each one of the eight Walsh codes in Table 1 is orthogonal to all the
other codes. For example, the product of code 0 with any other code is merely a replica of the
other code (for example, the product of code 0 with code 3 is just another copy of code 3,
namely binary 10011001). Since each of these product results contains four binary 1 and four
binary 0 bits, (1 and 0 binary represent +1 and -1 volts respectively), the overall time average
voltage of the 8-bit product waveform is zero. The same is true for the product of any other two
codes. Another example: the product of code 3 with code 7 is 00001111, which also has an
average value of zero volts in NRZ waveform representation.
CDMA exploits the use of orthogonal (or nearly orthogonal) PN-PRBS code sequences to
permit multiplexing and separation of the various different data bit streams which all are
transmitted on the same radio frequency carrier. Consider the case of two different orthogonal
PN-PRBS codes, each one used with a different data bit stream. When two signals are added
in our simple NRZ waveform representation, the instantaneous voltage before modulation, or
at the output of the demodulator, can be at any of the voltage values +2, +1, 0, -1 or -2 volts.
Consider the case of a data bit value of +1 volt. When we look at the output waveform d from
the matching channel decoder in Figure 2 during this one data bit time interval, we see a
decoded waveform which jumps back and forth between +2 and 0 volts, with an average value
of +1 volt over the data bit interval. A simple time averaging operation (such as a suitable low-
pass filter) removes these variations and produces only the average value of +1 volt.
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a NRZ (non-
1 1 0 1
return to
zero) data Waveform d also is a replica of a after error free decoding time
stream example
1100011110,1111001000,0011001111,... shows only
10 PRBS bits
per data bit
b PRBS
NRZ time
stream
c Product
waveform time
Figure 3: CDMA Waveforms

{
Notice the inversion of the NRZ polarity
while the data bit is zero.
The particular system design of the IS-95 standard uses 64 Walsh codes, each code having a
64 bit duration (combined with secondary codes) as the basis of the downlink direction PN-
PRBS code bit sequences. Two of these 64 Walsh codes are reserved respectively for
transmitting a clock signal from the base to the mobiles, and for a setup channel, shared by all
the mobile stations, for the exchange of call setup messages prior to the conversation phase
of a connection. As a part of the design strategy to support soft handover (described below),
the uplink PN-PRBS codes are approximately orthogonal. Distinct uplink codes are generated
by an internal 42 bit feedback shift register in each mobile station. There are 242 (=4.398
trillion) different unique mobile station identity codes which may be used to initialize this shift
register, so there is no problem providing a unique identifier and a distinct uplink PN-PRBS
code sequence for each mobile station ever to be manufactured. Downlink codes also
incorporate the distinct output of such a specific shift register as well.
When the PN-PRBS codes for two channels are not orthogonal over a data bit time interval,
the product waveform does not "average out" to produce exactly a +1 or -1 volt data bit value.
The average voltage may have some positive or negative error. If the deviation of the average
voltage from the desired +1 or –1 volt level is big enough, the result may be a data bit error at
the decoder.
Bit errors can also occur when the PN-PRBS codes are perfectly orthogonal, but the signal
from an undesired channel is much stronger than the desired channel. Consider the case of
two different radio transmitters, one powerful and the other weak. In our NRZ waveform
representation, one channel's NRZ waveform alternates between +1 and -1 volt at the
detector, while the other channel's NRZ waveform alternates between +0.01 and -0.01 volts. In
this case, the stronger signal dominates the detection process and it is difficult or impossible to
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detect the correct binary value of the weak signal. This can occur in a base receiver when a
strong signal arrives from a powerful nearby mobile transmitter and a weak signal arrives from
a more distant, and/or lower power, mobile transmitter. In general, regardless of the cause of
the disparity of the received power level from the two channels, this is known historically as the
"near-far" problem in CDMA system design. This "near-far" problem is addressed in IS-95 by
feedback power control of the mobile transmitters. The objectives of this feedback control are
to compensate for both differences is distance, and also for short term changes in signal
strength due to fast fading. The former objective is also achieved in GSM and other systems
by a similar method of feedback control, and it works with adequate accuracy in all
technologies. The latter objective is only partially achieved in CDMA, and is still a problem area
for that technology.
All cellular systems make use of some type of power control of the mobile transmitter via
messages or commands transmitted from the base station. These messages are based upon
the measurement of the received signal strength indication – RSSI – at the base receiver. In
the IS-95 design, one of the patented features of the system design is a very frequent
(approximately 10 commands per second) and very small step (1 dB adjustments) feedback
power control signal. CDMA is known to be very sensitive to slight differences in the RSSI of
different code channels. A difference of as little as 2 dB between two received code channels
causes apprecciable degradation of the BER of the weaker channel. Use of these frequent
power adjustments produces a measurable improvement in the constancy of received power
level. However, the performance (BER) of the CDMA digital channel is extremely sensitive to
the precision of this power control, and the inability of existing CDMA systems to achieve their
theoretical capacity may be partly attributed to imperfections in this feedback power control, in
the view of several independent analysts.
Even with perfect power control, and absolutely orthogonal PN-PRBS codes, CDMA bit errors
still occur. The most significant cause occurs when the total number of received signals is such
that the sum of all the signals and the random noise (from thermal noise and other sources,
not previously discussed in this section of the report) is just too large compared to one desired
signal. The combination of all these un-correlated CDMA and noise signals approaches a
random (Gaussian probability) amplitude distribution. The result is that the average of the total
voltage waveform from all these many signal sources, over the data bit interval, is too close to
zero to accurately classify the average voltage as either +1 or -1 volt. This problem is more
significant in a system with a higher PN-PRBS bit rate and a higher number of codes.
To summarize the theoretical operation of a CDMA system: Each data bit stream (such as
digitally coded speech) is encoded by combining it with a distinct PN-PRBS code. The PN-
PRBS codes for each such channel are approximately orthogonal, and thus they can be
separated from each other at the receiver by the multiplication and time averaging process
(called cross correlation) which extracts the desired data bits and averages out the erroneous
fluctuations caused by other undesired signals. However, in many cases these fluctuations are
so large that they produce intolerable bit errors.
4 Historical Notes Regarding CDMA:

The early promises regarding extreme CDMA capacity and performance were made in 1989-
1990, when limited traffic capacity of 800 MHz analog cellular was perceived as the main
problem of the day. Initial very approximate analysis by CDMA proponents suggested that
CDMA could offer capacity of up to 40 times that of 7-cell 30 kHz analog cellular. At that time,
the TR-45 standards committee had just completed two years of divisive debate on the relative
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merits of TDMA versus frequency division multiple access, finally agreeing on the development
of IS-54 (later IS-136) TDMA digital cellular. They were not initially receptive to opening official
discussion of yet another alternative. However, the arguments of Qualcomm proved to be
persuasive to several of the largest cellular operators who were suffering the most from 800
MHz band capacity problems at that time. These influential cellular operators persuaded the
TR-45 committee to set up a TR-45.5 working group to ratify the Qualcomm CDMA design as
the IS-95 standard. The IS-95 (cdmaOne) standard was later revised to cover 1.9 GHz band
equipment and dual band equipment, in addition to the original 800 MHz band design.
Like many completely new systems, CDMA took much longer to complete than originally
promised. Working systems (as opposed to test systems) did not start operating until the last
month of 1997, and then only on the 1.9 GHz band. While many scattered 800 MHz
installations are in place, and while some are described by their respective system operators
as commercial operations, many of these 800 MHz installations are still described in 1999 by
their system operators as test systems. Although handover from analog cellular mode to
CDMA mode is permitted in a dual mode 800 MHz band IS-95 handset, the reverse is not
supported.5 Once a mobile call is in CDMA mode in an 800 MHz dual-mode analog-CDMA
system, all the cells in the system must have CDMA base equipment or the call will disconnect
when the subscriber drives into a cell without CDMA base equipment. Most 800 MHz operators
have stopped far short of a full 800 MHz CDMA system installation in every cell. They describe
this incomplete installation as a test installation, and often restrict the use to a limited number
of specially recruited 800 MHz subscribers, who must agree to conditions of use which include
acknowledging that CDMA service is not available in all cells, and that unexpected
disconnection may occur in some locations. Almost all of the commercially functioning CDMA
installations in North America are on the 1.9 GHz band.
CDMA has been dogged by controversy. Several competitive manufacturers of other cellular
and PCS technologies, particularly Ericsson Radio Systems, have engaged in a rather
acrimonious debate with Qualcomm about the relative merits of their technologies, and some
of this debate has gone past the boundary of politeness and carefully considered scientific
dialog. CDMA proponents have not been able to demonstrate system capacity as large as
originally promised, and the continuing problems with 800 MHz installations have been a
source of embarrassment (see further technical comments below). Many industry observers
say that the 1.9 GHz band has given CDMA a new lease on life, and without it there might still
not be any commercially operating CDMA systems in North America.
4.1 Significance (if any) of “Third Generation” (3G)

Many cellular and PCS researchers are striving to design a so-called third-generation (3G)
cellular and PCS system. However, the crystal ball which some industry pundits gaze into to
see the future of 3G is very murky, indeed. At the present time, 3G systems are the subject of
discussion and “paper tiger” designs, which will presumably give everyone full mobility and
access to very high bit rates for voice, data, video, Internet access, and a variety of other
planned services. One of the implied requirements of 3G systems is the agreement of the
industry on one technology, rather than today’s hodge podge of different incompatible
technologies. Unfortunately, the telecommunications industry is not close to any agreement on
5
Several technological methods to upgrade the design of 800 MHz cdmaOne, so that CDMA-to-analog handoff can
be supported, have been suggested and some have been field tested. This capability may become available in the
“Rate 2” redesign noted later in this report.
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a single radio interface technology for 3G. Not all 3G proposals involve CDMA, as some CDMA
proponents claim. Several 3G proposals use TDMA. Even some opponents of existing CDMA,
such as Ericsson and others, have proposed wide-band CDMA (or W-CDMA, using a 5 MHz
or higher bit rate for the PN-PRBS bit stream) as part of a 3G system. An important point
regarding even the CDMA 3G proposals is that, except for the CDMA-2000 proposal of
Qualcomm, none of the other CDMA-based 3G system proposals are backward compatible
with present IS-95 equipment or technology. Qualcomm has just recently (November 1998)
complicated the situation even further by claiming that these incompatible CDMA plans are all
in violation of Qualcomm’s patents, and stated their intent to block development of all
proposed 3G technologies using CDMA in any form, other than their own proposal. Ericsson
has countered with their own claims regarding other patents covering the same types of
technology. At the time of publication of this report, the ITU-T standards organization has
threatened to exclude all CDMA technologies from further consideration for 3G standards, if
the various combatants cannot agree to reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing of any
applicable patents, which is the normal practice for patents needed to implement standards.
In any case, it is far from certain what technology will actually exist in 3G, or whether a
radically different 3G technology is really needed rather than a reduction in the retail price and
further already-planned development of some existing technology such as GSM. Several
stakeholders in the cellular and PCS industry feel that the present assortment of competing
technologies is still undergoing continual changes and improvements, and has not been
sufficiently field tested and optimized to fully evaluate their relative suitability as the basis of a
3G technology. Furthermore, the emphasis in several published 3G plans on extremely high bit
rate digital data streams, video, and other exotic capabilities may not have a payoff in the
marketplace. The present author tends to view most existing 3G activities as premature based
on this same evaluation.
4.2 Critique of CDMA and IS-95:

Qualcomm must be awarded high marks for their organizational ability to pull together a
development team and develop all the elements of a working system during 1989-1997 under
the difficult circumstances of the current PCS industry. At the same time, a neutral observer
can make many justified criticisms of CDMA in general, and of the IS-95 design in particular,
which call into question its ultimate competitive future. These appear below.
A number of problems have emerged with CDMA. Some of these are peculiar to the design of
6
the IS-95 system, and theoretically could be eliminated by a system re-design . Other
problems are more fundamental, and will exist in any CDMA system, regardless of design
details. Furthermore, some very productive methods for increasing cellular/PCS system
capacity, such as overlay/underlay, are not feasible with CDMA. In many cases, the
disappointment expressed by some people about CDMA is not based on ranking its
performance on an absolute scale, but rather on comparison of the actual performance
(particularly the capacity) compared to early unfulfilled promises. In other cases, the concerns
center on economics rather than technological performance.
6
Qualcomm is engaged in at least a partial re-design of the IS-95 system, known as Rate 2 CDMA. The new
design is intended to be implemented in dual-mode CDMA base equipment so that both existing and new Rate 2
handsets will continue to operate on all base stations. While a few of the objectives and system changes have
been made public, much of the redesign is not yet known to the public, and it is not clear to what extent Rate 2 will
resolve the issues raised here.
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5 Unsubstantiated GSM Claims:

As noted earlier, both sides in the GSM-CDMA dispute have made unsubstantiated claims.
Rather than performing a systematic technological analysis of the total operation of CDMA and
GSM, several specific claims will be addressed in this report. We will give conclusions stated
with a minimal summary of the background reasoning. First we admit that there is one GSM
claim which has not been fully substantiated.
The most significant unsubstantiated GSM claims relate to statements that GSM, using
optional frequency hopping, is a “spread spectrum” technology, and out-does CDMA because
of a wider range of radio frequencies it uses. In other words, these GSM proponents (primarily
Ericsson) claim that the 15 MHz range of frequency hopping used in most 1900 MHz band
PCS-1900 installations always produces better signal quality and BER performance than IS-95
CDMA. In practice, a GSM system using frequency hopping has superior BER performance,
compared to a GSM installation with no frequency hopping. This is particularly important when
many of the subscribers are stationary (as in a WLL installation) or are slow moving
pedestrians. Frequency hopping combined with discontinuous transmit (described below) is
also beneficial for reducing the average level of mutual co-carrier cell-to-cell interference and
increasing the system capacity. The improved BER level arising from use of GSM frequency
hopping facilitates the installation of n=4 frequency plan GSM systems, and even “tighter”
GSM frequency plans, which have a higher capacity than n=7 or other larger cell cluster
frequency plans.
Installation-optional frequency hopping (combined with mandatory bit interleaving) in GSM
primarily helps to reduce the BER due to a fade at the current location of a stationary mobile
antenna at a particular frequency. When frequency hopping is operative, most of the TDMA
radio bursts occur at frequencies which are not affected by a particular frequency fade at that
antenna location. The bandwidth over which a fade affects the radio signal (the so-called
coherence bandwidth, explained in more detail in the appendix) is dependent upon the time
delay spread between the earliest and latest arriving multi-path rays. Because delay spread in
urban areas can be as large as 20 microseconds, the coherence bandwidth can be as small as
0.05 MHz (50 kHz). However, when the delay spread is less than a microsecond, which is
often the case in clutter-free rural areas with few reflecting surfaces, the coherence bandwidth
is much greater than a megahertz. Furthermore, there may be more than one frequency at
which a fade occurs in a particular location. This is a property of the local geography of
reflecting surfaces (from buildings, cliffs, etc.). A region with many reflecting surfaces may
have fades at many different radio frequencies. Therefore, we cannot state with certainty that
any signal which has greater bandwidth (whether it is a CDMA or a GSM signal) will always be
better quality (lower BER, for example) than another signal of narrower bandwidth.
In a region with a single fade frequency having a coherence bandwidth of 1 MHz, a GSM
signal using 15 MHz of frequency hopping range will be superior to a 1 MHz bandwidth CDMA
signal. However, in a region with several different fading frequencies, each one having a 50
kHz coherence bandwidth, a CDMA signal may be better than the previously described GSM
frequency hopping signal. When extremely precise estimates are desired, the exact signal
quality will depend on the particular frequencies of the fades vis-à-vis the frequencies used in
that cell for GSM frequency hopping. In short, the result is dependent on local cell multi path
characteristics and one cannot make a sweeping generalization. There is no quantitative
experimental basis for claiming that a GSM system with a wider frequency hopping range will
always have proportionately superior performance (for example, 15 times as good because of
15 MHz vs. 1 MHz frequency range) compared to a CDMA system.
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Analogies are sometimes made in the literature to the Discrete Multi-Tone (DMT) method of
data transmission which was adopted, due to its superior performance, as the standard for
Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Loop (ADSL) high bit-rate digital transmission over copper
telephone wires. DMT is indeed partly analogous to frequency hopping, but DMT transmits
digital information on several different carrier frequencies at the same time, instead of in a
sequential frequency hopping pattern. DMT systems continually evaluate the noise,
interference, and multipath fading (which in wire transmission occurs due to unterminated wire
stubs which are left attached to some telephone wires due to previous connections which are
no longer in service). Carrier frequencies which have inferior performance are assigned a
lower modulation bit rate or are, in the extreme case, completely shut off.
Certain frequency hopping GSM installations (such as Nokia’s IFH, described below) operate
according to similar principles. Idle carrier frequency noise is measured before assigning each
new or handed-in conversation in each cell, so that bad frequencies are not used when
feasible. When long term inferior performance is identified on certain frequencies (perhaps due
to external radio interference sources which the system operator cannot control), a
modification is effected in the frequencies assigned to that cell. Only frequencies which do not
fall in the interfered parts of the spectrum are used. When all of this is done, and the degraded
frequencies are predictable to a sufficient degree, frequency hopping GSM technology can
indeed demonstrate superior performance to direct spread spectrum CDMA. However, when
all the degradation is effectively random for each mobile user, and has a coherence bandwidth
which is very wide, and there is no dynamic adjustment of the system to respond to changing
conditions, then no general claim of superiority can be substantiated merely because of
different overall operative bandwidth. There is only an improvement when the system is
continually optimized in response to actual operating conditions, as in Nokia IFH.
5.1 Supportable GSM Claims:

When GSM was still in the pre-production stage, a number of its planned features were
challenged by opponents on various grounds, but all of these GSM system capabilities have
proven to be workable and useful. The claims made for superiority of GSM with regard to ease
of system design and installation, flexibility and availability of alternative bearer capabilities
(half rate speech coder, fax and data, use of higher data bit rates, etc.) have been borne out
by experience. The frequency planning and system engineering of a GSM system is much less
dependent on site-specific or subscriber-specific parameters than CDMA. A relatively firm
estimate of best and worst case GSM system characteristics can be made with confidence. In
contrast, estimates of system capacity for CDMA are well known to be extremely sensitive to
unique local cell-site characteristics. Two of these characteristics are multi-path radio wave
propagation (related to the presence and location of reflective surfaces from buildings, cliffs
and other objects) and also the average ratio of sound to silence for the users of the voice
channels. (In contrast, local multi path delay spread does not affect the capacity estimates for
GSM significantly.) The difference between best and worst case CDMA capacity estimates is
very large (factors of 3 to 1 or more occur) and are not easily predicted without extensive and
careful field testing. Changes in the base station transmitter power in one CDMA cell increases
the interference level of all its neighboring cells which use the same carrier frequency. This
usually requires careful re-balancing of the base station power throughout all the cells of the
CDMA system. In contrast, the radio coverage of each GSM cell can be designed and
optimized independent of its neighbors. The bottom line of this aspect of GSM is a much faster
installation of new systems, and lower costs to maintain the proper radio coverage in an
existing system, or to predictably modify the cell radio coverage as a system grows.
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GSM has been first to implement a number of alternative bearer services, and has remained
ahead of most other technologies with the implementation of short message service (SMS),
broadcast messages, and other innovative features as well. There are several reasons for this.
First, GSM was designed from the beginning with a long range plan in mind. This plan included
supporting every type of digital signal which can be carried on the traditional wire telephone
network, as well as some others. Second, a large body of skilled technical people (from most
of the electronics manufacturing and academic research organizations of Europe, plus others
as well) are working continually to upgrade the features of GSM. This latter point may be
viewed as a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is the result of a business arrangement between
these firms in the European Union, and not related to the technological issues underlying the
GSM system design. However, it is a fact, and every GSM user benefits from this activity.
6 Relevant Measures of Capacity and Cost:

Sometimes the misleading term "spectral efficiency" (the ratio of conversations per kHz of
bandwidth for a single base station) is used to compare among cellular or PCS technologies,
without regard to service area coverage. To make valid comparisons between two cellular or
PCS technologies, we must consider two system installations in the same total service area,
where each installation is done with the maximum capacity of each technology installed in the
legally allocated total system bandwidth (kHz). The proper measure of system capacity for a
cellular or PCS system is the geographic-spectral capacity, G, given by
G= conversations/ (total kHz × system area). Eq. 1
The term “conversations” refers to the number or quantity of all circuit switched connections,
whether carrying voice (traditional conversations) or data. This expression for capacity is more
meaningful than spectral efficiency, because cellular systems do not use all the frequency
bandwidth existing in every cell. In a GSM system, only a fraction of the licensed frequencies
are used in each cell. In a CDMA system, only a fraction of the designed CDMA codes can
actually be used in one cell of a multicell system. Many presentations of CDMA mislead the
reader because they present the theoretical capacity of a single isolated CDMA cell (62 code
channels), but in a multi cell system one can, in fact, seldom exceed 18 useable code
channels. This is as misleading as presenting a single GSM cell with all the licensed carrier
frequencies operating in that one cell. This is theoretically possible in a one cell system, but it
does not correspond to reality.
When comparing different technologies, it is necessary to use different values for the
equivalent number of conversations in CDMA when comparing voice (which benefits from
exploiting intervals of silence as explained below) versus circuit switched or synchronous data
(which does not benefit by exploitation of pauses in the signal flow). CDMA has an effectively
far lower number of simultaneous permitted circuit switched “conversations” for data,
sometimes as low as 50% of the number of simultaneous voice conversations. GSM can also
be configured to provide more capacity for voice than for data, and many past published
comparisons have not taken this into account.. Most early and simple GSM capacity estimates
were based on continuous transmission capacity. Packet data transmission via either
technology can also exploit silent intervals between packets, but many prior published
comparisons have unfairly computed the capacity of GSM and other TDMA technologies when
carrying continuous transmission voice or data, while computing the capacity of CDMA while
carrying discontinuous transmission of voice.
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In this report, the unidirectional bandwidth (that is, uplink bandwidth alone of 25 kHz per
conversation for GSM) will be used. This is done in the majority of other published studies as
well. Because both systems under consideration have a corresponding uplink and downlink
bandwidth, the total system bandwidth actually used is double the number described in this
report.
A more significant measure than G is spectral-geographic-economic performance, S, given by:
S= conversations/ (total kHz × $ equivalent cost × system area), Eq. 2
Where the symbolic $ equivalent cost may be expressed either of two ways, so long as the
selected method of expression is used consistently. It may be expressed as equivalent
capitalization, which is true capital installation cost plus a fictitious initial capital amount
necessary to cover equivalent monthly operational costs (rent, salaries, electric power, etc.) at
prevailing interest rates. Alternatively, it may be expressed as equivalent operational cost per
month (or per year). This is a combination of true recurring operational costs plus the
equivalent amortization cost of the true capital investment at prevailing interest rates. The
choice of expressing this per month or per year is also arbitrary, provided that all calculations
are consistent. For WLL installations this cost will include the operator-furnished customer
premise equipment (such as a customer premise fixed antenna and signal converter
equipment), but usually not the telephone set, fax machine, or other customer-provided
equipment. In contrast, for mobile cellular/PCS installations, subscriber mobile set costs are
not included, when they are fully paid by the subscriber. When a part of the “true” cost of the
handset is subsidized by the system operator, this subsidy amount must be included in the
system operational or capital cost.
In general, CDMA handsets cost about 40% more than a comparable GSM handset. At this
time the retail price of either CDMA or GSM mobile/portable handsets to the consumer are
about the same, but this is a misleading retail situation due to a higher operator-provided
subsidy of the CDMA sets. This difference may be smaller in the future, but most sources
expect the cost of CDMA handsets to remain higher than GSM sets for the foreseeable future.
In general, different cellular or PCS technologies may be compared by means of parameters G
and S. When only technology and not economics is of interest, the system with the largest
value of G is superior. When economics as well as technology is important, the system with
the largest value of S is superior. The technology with the highest value of G, does not
necessarily have the largest value of S. A useful business comparison is to examine the
values of S for two different technology installations which have been intentionally configured
to have the same total conversation or traffic capacity (at same or similar quality of voice
coding, etc., discussed below) in the same area and total system bandwidth. This type of
comparison emphasizes distinctions between the number of base stations required to cover
the area and the cost per base station. This comparison of two equivalent capacity installations
is the best "apples to apples" comparison.
Looking ahead to the conclusion of this report, GSM can be configured to have a superior
value of both G and S, by using all of the system design optimization methods available for
GSM. In the past, several published comparisons indicate an advantage for CDMA in measure
G compared to GSM. In fact, the only cases where CDMA has such an advantage occur when:
1. The GSM design has not been optimized (frequency hopping with discontinuous transmit
and overlaid cells are not used), but
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2. The comparison CDMA system makes used of discontinuous transmission and only in the
single frequency configuration (n=1) for all cells. In contrast, CDMA frequency plans
involving n=2 or more are inferior.
When we avoid this special and unrealistic case, GSM has a clear advantage in measure S
compared to CDMA in all configurations. Therefore, in a situation where strong price
competition is a major vendor differentiation in a competitive market, as some industry
observers predict for the near future, a GSM system is both economically and technically
superior to CDMA. In an extreme competitive situation with heavy price cutting, the GSM
system could survive and retain profitability when its CDMA competitor may not.
We will consider the details of the various optimization methods and how they affect G, but
first we make some comments about the relationship of measure S to some of the hardware
design aspects.
One reason why GSM systems are superior in measure S is the effect of the different
modularity step size for the two technologies. GSM base station capacity can be selectively
increased or decreased (within the maximum capacity limits of the technology) in smaller steps
by provisioning more or less base radio transceivers in that cell. During the growth life cycle of
a GSM base station, the capacity can be increased when required by installation of one
additional base transceiver having 8 channels. For a short time this will be under-utilized (or
over-provisioned), but relatively soon the traffic will increase so that the capacity is fully
utilized.
CDMA base installations are less modular, and therefore the actual cost of the base station
increases by large steps when hardware is installed for added CDMA capacity. During the
growth life cycle of a base station the system cost will have a large jump when new base
equipment is added. This increase is typically a complete sector or cell assembly which
nominally adds 62 channels (in practice, approximately 18 of these channels will be useable in
most installations). Because the modular traffic increase step is larger (more than twice as
large), there will be a longer time interval of under-utilization or over-capacity, even with the
same traffic growth rate as the GSM system. There will be a longer interval of higher cost per
income-producing channel. The cost per technically available channel is also larger for CDMA
as well, due to higher overall hardware costs. This larger module size and cost also makes the
use of CDMA for micro-cells or pico-cells (geographically small cells with very low traffic
capacity but also very low cost) impractical with presently available CDMA equipment.
$ $
Income
Loss Profit
Expense:
Expense:
Large
Small
Modular
Modular
Income Steps
Profit Steps
time time
Figure 4: Profitability Comparison of Hypothetical Large and Small Expense Steps
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The cost of this temporary over-capacity is not considered in equation 2, because equation 2
deals with technically available capacity, whether it is utilized or not. The effect of large module
steps in capacity can be better appreciated by computing the time history and then cumulative
estimated income and expense for continually growing revenue producing traffic. Compared
to the higher total monthly operating costs which persist for several months after the
installation of added base station capacity, income may catch up with increased expense in a
month or less with a system having a smaller expense step size. Even if two technologies had
the same cost per channel at the same final maximum capacity installed configuration, the
system with the smaller modules will be more profitable over the growth life cycle of the
system. This is illustrated in Figure 4, where the system operator must continually provide
some over-capacity to minimize traffic blockage. However, unlike the example in Figure 4, the
equipment costs per channel of CDMA and GSM are not equal. CDMA equipment cost is
actually 30 to 60% higher than GSM, even when fully utilized. In fairness to CDMA, we must
note that CDMA vendors are already aware of this deficiency, and many are promising new
hardware designs in the future which will permit smaller and less costly modules to provide
traffic capacity step increases of less than the full set of code channels.
The measures S and G are related by the equation S = G/($ equivalent cost). Furthermore, the
measure S can also be expressed in the alternative form:
S= [conversations/kHz / base station] × [1/ (M × $/base station)] × [1/ (cell area)], Eq. 3
where M is the total number of base stations, and "cell area" is the average radio coverage
area of a single base station. (In a real system, not all cells have the same size.) The 3 distinct
terms in Eq. 3, each one shown in square brackets, can be identified as follows: The first term
is the traditional spectral efficiency or capacity for one base station. The second term is the
reciprocal of the total cost of all base stations. In a complete analysis, this figure should
include their directly associated costs, such as real estate, tower rental cost, cost of
transmission links between a cell and the central switch, signal conversion and processing
equipment added at the switch to interface to the transmission links between switch and cell
site etc. The third term, as noted, is the reciprocal of the (average) cell area.
In a more comprehensive economic analysis, we should also add the cost of the central
switching equipment – the Mobile-service Switching Center or MSC – to the denominator of
this second term. The cost of an MSC is lower for a GSM system for two reasons. The first
reason is the result of the highly competitive market for GSM switches, since the interfaces are
open (fully standard) on both the PSTN side and the base station side (the so-called A-
interface). Because of these open interfaces, competitive market forces between suppliers of
base stations and switches benefit the system operator by reducing the cost of a GSM MSC.
In contrast, although there are several vendors of CDMA base systems, a CDMA system today
is a closed system with regard to competition, since the system operator must buy all base
system equipment from one vendor. The second reason is that the present design of all CDMA
systems uses a basic MSC switch plus a large and complex auxiliary switching assembly (a
signal converter module and controller) between the MSC and each base station, which adds
significantly to the cost of the CDMA MSC hardware. Again future designs may combine this
module with a switch to achieve reduced costs, but this costly auxiliary CDMA module is the
only way to make a CDMA base system today. Although CDMA proponents have long
acknowledged that there was significantly higher cost in every part of the CDMA system, their
previous argument was that the alleged higher capacity of CDMA compensated for this. In our
terms, they claimed that S for CDMA was larger because the G factor in the numerator term of
S was so much “larger” than the higher cost figures in the denominator that everything would
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come out better economically for CDMA. In fact, this does not appear to be the case in current
and expected future IS-95 technology.7
Not all the terms and expressions in Eq. 3 are independent of each other. Certain fixed costs
related to real estate and structure (buildings and towers) are present for each base station.
Therefore, a system which covers the total service area using less base stations and more cell
area per base station is usually economically desirable. The first two terms are not necessarily
independent, since a radio modulation and coding technology with greater spectral efficiency
usually is also more susceptible to interference and noise, and thus the cell area is reduced
and the required number, M, of base stations is increased.
The way that M appears in these equations suggests that the technological system capacity
(G, but not S) can be improved by using more base stations (larger M) each with a small area.
This is in fact the basis of the concept of cell splitting, the replacement of one large cell by a
cluster of smaller cells, thus giving more total system capacity. Cell splitting cannot continue to
the extreme case of an arbitrarily large number of arbitrarily small cells, for both technical and
economic reasons. The most important technical limit is the severe reduction in power of both
base and mobile transmitters required in smaller cells. It is extremely difficult to make a radio
transmitter which radiates controllable power levels at less than about 5 to 10 milliwatts, since
the radio frequency (RF) "leakage" from the circuits operating inside a typical transmitter is
already at that level without any RF power amplifier. Thus the smallest cell size used in public
wireless systems in North America is typically about 1 km (0.6 mi) diameter. (Various types of
in-building and short range systems do use smaller microcells as well.) The economic limitation
to cell splitting arises from the non-equipment costs (real estate, towers, buildings, power and
air conditioning, etc.) and mounting of antennas, etc., for a base station. Costs related to real
estate do not go down proportionately as the power level and size of the base station
decreases and the number of base stations increases. Also, as noted before, CDMA base
equipment is not presently available in modules as small as GSM base stations, so so-called
micro-cells or pico-cells are not presently as economically feasible as with GSM.
The optimal way to minimize the economic measure S occurs when the designed radio
coverage area per base station (sometimes called the cell coverage) is increased, thus giving
a smaller M, since the product of the two, which represents the total system area, must remain
constant. The complex way in which these three quantities are inter-related to each other and
to site-specific parameters, particularly for CDMA, has led to considerable confusion and some
obfuscation of reality in previous comparisons. Furthermore, looking ahead to the conclusions,
there is no consistent advantage in cell coverage area for CDMA compared to GSM. Actual
CDMA cell coverage is, on average, about the same as GSM technology cell coverage, and
useful CDMA coverage is much more influenced by site-specific properties and changes
according to overall system traffic in a way which does not occur in GSM technology.
7
Some examples of comparative costs of GSM vs. AMPS and IS-136 are available in the book GSM Superphones,
by L. Harte, R. Levine, and G. Livingston, published by McGraw-Hill Publishing Co., New York, 1999, in chapter 7
(e.g. page 221. The emphasis there is on the benefits of multiplexing more channels on the same carrier.) CDMA
was not treated in this book because the authors could not obtain useable published cost figures for CDMA.
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7 Capacity
7.1 Technological Factors Affecting System Capacity:

There are two technology factors which most affect system capacity (parameter G described
above). The first parameter is the so-called "capture ratio," which is the minimum carrier to
interference (plus noise) ratio at which the radio system can operate with an output signal
which is substantially free from error. The second parameter is the spectral bandwidth per
conversation.
In algebraic symbols, the capture ratio is expressed as the minimum useable value of C/(I+n).
A familiar benchmark of this type is the ratio 63/1 or 18 dB for analog cellular 30 kHz AMPS.
Thus, an analog AMPS cellular system may be installed with a 7-cell frequency re-use pattern
using omni-directional base station antennas. A radio technology with a lower capture ratio
permits the designer to re-use the same carrier frequency in cells which are much closer to
each other than a radio technology with a high capture ratio, and to install more carrier
frequencies in each cell.
This 7-cell arrangement (and also a 3 cell and 4 cell arrangement as well) is illustrated in
Figure 5, where each of the 7 cells has an identifying number. This figure uses the familiar
hexagon as a simplification for the useable area boundary of the cell, since the real shape of
each cell is approximately circular but irregular in a manner dependent on local topography.
For simplicity this figure also illustrates only omni-directional cells, and all cells of the same
size, although most modern systems use sectored cells exclusively, and also use smaller cells
in portions of the city having higher traffic density. All the cells in the 7-cell cluster part of
Figure 5 which are labeled 1 use carrier frequencies number 1, 8, 15, … etc. All cells labeled
2 use carrier frequencies 2, 9, 16, … etc., and so on. Consider the cell labeled 1. Although
there are 6 cells near (but not touching) it which also use the same carrier frequencies, the
ratio of the desired signal in this cell to the sum of these interfering signals from the distant
8
cells is greater than the capture ratio. Only 4 of these 6 interfering cells are illustrated in the 7-
cell part of Figure 5. In a 7-cell cluster, 1/7th of the carrier frequencies can be installed in each
cell. For the case of 416 carrier frequencies legally assigned to one system operator in 800
9
MHz AMPS, 59 carrier frequencies may be installed in each cell .
8
This statement applies to the outer boundary of a cell, where the signal from the central base station antenna is
weakest, and the interference from one of the interfering cells is strongest. This example is also the case where the
radio signal strength, RSSI, decreases with distance r from the base station according to the formula RSSI(watts)
4
= Po/r or RSSI(dB)=10×log Po -40×log(r). This decrease of 40 dB per decade (or factor of 10) in distance is
reasonably accurate for most large city radio wave propagation estimates. If we look further away from the central
cell in a cellular system, there are even more than 6 interfering cells using the same frequency. However, with large
cells in a public cellular system, this "second rank" of interfering cells is usually sufficiently distant to be over the
horizon, so there is insignificant interference from them at UHF band frequencies.
9
The actual value of 416/7 is 59.42, and therefore we actually install 59 carriers in some cells and 60 carriers in
others. There are some special practical problems as well in real systems. Some frequencies are used for call
setup and not for voice traffic. Because most of the existing analog cellular radio equipment does not have the good
modern radio filters used in new production radios, we cannot actually put two adjacent carrier frequency numbers
in two geographically adjacent cells when we use omni-directional antennas. Therefore, early omni-directional cell
analog cellular installations had to omit many of the frequencies in each cell. The practical result was that actually
only 1/9th of all the frequencies were useable in each cell (only 46 carriers instead of 59). However, by using
sectored base station antennas, it is possible to use all 59 carrier frequencies with some other complications such
as reduction in trunking efficiency which, if discussed in detail, would take us too far from the main topic of this
report.
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The second parameter which affects capacity G is the spectrum efficiency of the modulation
and coding. In general, most modulation choices which reduce the effective bandwidth of a
radio signal also have the undesirable effect of increasing the required capture ratio.
A striking example can be drawn from the cases of AM or from the narrow band FM system N-
AMPS (IS-88), which otherwise have no other technical bearing on the current discussion. N-
AMPS uses narrow-band low-deviation analog FM, so its radio bandwidth is only 10 kHz
instead of the 30 kHz of standard AMPS. Consequently it requires a greater capture ratio to
10
work effectively , about 200/1 (23 dB) compared to the 63/1 (18 dB) of AMPS. As a result, N-
AMPS does not have a greater overall system capacity G compared to AMPS. This property of
N-AMPS was misunderstood for several years in the cellular industry, and it was consequently
incorrectly promoted in the past as an alternative to IS-136 for higher overall system capacity.
If N-AMPS is installed throughout all the cells of a system and all the potentially interfering
radio carrier frequencies are turned on in all cells, a 20-cell group (not illustrated in Figure 5) is
needed for N-AMPS. This separates the mutually interfering cells sufficiently to reduce the
interference. But the result is typically only 20 sets of 3 narrow bandwidth carrier frequencies in
each cell, for a total of 60 conversations in each cell, which is almost the same as the 59 or 60
channels using 30 kHz AMPS.
The result is that the geographical spectral efficiency G of N-AMPS is about the same as
AMPS. Although not useful for an overall system capacity increase, N-AMPS is useful in
certain city installations, such as Las Vegas, NV, where there is high cellular traffic demand in
the downtown area, and very little cellular traffic in the residential suburbs of the city. In that
situation, N-AMPS can be used only in the downtown cells to give more traffic capacity, and
regular AMPS can be used in the suburban cells, with the potentially interfering AMPS
frequencies not installed in the suburbs. (A special dual bandwidth mobile station is required,
and today only Motorola, the proponent of N-AMPS makes such a set.) The result is that some
downtown cells have 80 to 100 narrow-band N-AMPS carrier frequencies, while some
suburban cells have only 20 ordinary AMPS carrier frequencies installed (instead of the usual
60).
Similarly, certain things which a designer can do to improve the capture ratio of a radio signal,
such as adding more bits of error protection code to the fundamental data bits, also have the
undesirable effect of increasing the radio bandwidth. The problem in choosing an optimum
radio technology is simultaneously achieving both low signal bandwidth and low capture ratio
simultaneously.
It is well known that certain types of modulation and coding, for example amplitude modulation
(AM), do not exhibit the so-called "capture effect." If we examine the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N)
at the detector or demodulator stage inside a radio receiver, we find that the demodulated S/N
ratio for AM is substantially the same as the radio C/(I+n) ratio. The only way to get a good
audio signal from AM radio is to separate the two interfering “cells” (or transmitters) which use
the same AM frequency by an extremely large distance. If one listens to an AM band (550 to
1600 kHz band) broadcast radio receiver, particularly in the evening or night, the effect of
distant radio transmitters operating on the same carrier frequency is more pronounced. This is
partly a result of radio wave skip from ionized reflecting layers high in the evening sky. One
often hears a distant AM broadcast radio transmitter signal "in the background" of a local AM
10
The analysis of the relationship between analog FM deviation or bandwidth and its capture ratio is explained in
several textbooks, such as FM by R. Argimbau and R.B. Adler.
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broadcast signal. The interference is most noticeable when the local station’s audio is
11
momentarily quiet . FM is very different in this regard. When the C/(I+n) level of FM exceeds
the "capture" or threshold value, the audio S/N becomes much better than the radio channel
C/(I+n), as shown in Figure 6. The nominal capture ratio, which is marked with a small square
on each curve, depends on the bandwidth of the FM signal.
Frequency Clusters
Ideal hexagon pictures of n=3,4,7, omnidirectional clusters
2 2
3 3
1 1
2 2 2 7
3 3 3 5 2
1 1 1 1
2 2 3 4
3 3 7 6
4 1 1 5 2 7
3 1 5 2
2 3 4 1
1 4
4 3 7 6 3 4
2
2 3 1 4 5 2 7 6
1 4 2 3 1 5 2
2 3 1 3 4 1
1 4 6 3 4
2 3 6
1
Figure 5: Ideal Cell Cluster Illustrations
We can display a similar graph for digital cellular and PCS systems but the relevant measure
of signal quality is not the analog S/N ratio at the detector but the bit error rate (BER), the ratio
of erroneous received data bits to the total number of received data bits. We display this in
Figure 7 for ordinary GSM and optimized GSM, by adding an intentionally non-uniform scale
which shows the typical BER. This is an approximation for illustration purposes only, because
the details of the relationship between BER and S/N depends on the time pattern of the bit
errors (consecutive clusters of errors vs. isolated errors). The error pattern affects the quality of
the digital signal and its usefulness for error protection coding, and is not a constant factor.
This and all similar figures are therefore illustrative only and should not be used for design
purposes.
11
It is traditional to add together the power of all the undesired signals at a radio detector and call this the "Noise,"
which is represented by the capital letter N. In Cellular and PCS radio systems it is customary to distinguish the
interference power (capital I) from the (mainly thermal) noise (represented by a lower case n). The thermal noise
component n, of the total noise N, is due to the thermal kinetic motion of individual electrons, and is proportional to
the radio receiver bandwidth and the absolute (Kelvin) temperature. Another component part of the total noise is the
internally generated noise in the radio amplifiers. The ratio of this internal noise to the thermal noise is the so-
called "noise figure" of the receiver. In the discussion of this section of the report, the noise figure is taken to be 1/1
or 0 dB to simplify the discussion.
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AMPS 30 kHz FM
30
Good Audio Quality
20
dB S/N Acceptable Audio Quality
at N-AMPS 10 kHz FM
detec- 10
Unacceptable Audio Quality
tor
This illustration is
-10 not based on precise
data. Do not use
for design.
-20 -10 0 10 20 30 dB
C/(I+n) Radio channel
Figure 6: Relationship Between Detector S/N and Radio Channel C/(I+n)
Optimal GSM Non-optimal GSM
Approx BER dB S/N at detector not based on precise
data. Do not use
30 for design.
0.1%
1% 20
10%
10
50%
0
-10
-20 -10 0 10 20 30 dB
Figure 7: Approximate Bit Error Rate (BER) vs. C/(I+n) for two GSM Installations
Within the approximations implied by the previously stated qualifications, Figure 7 indicates the
approximate ranges of BER for various quality levels of digitally coded speech by means of the
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corresponding color shading of the vertical BER axis. The two new curves, which represent the
approximate relationship between C/(I+n) and BER, and ultimately speech quality, are shown
in black, while the related curves for analog cellular remain in pale gray for comparison.
The difference between ordinary GSM and optimized GSM is primarily the use of frequency
hopping in optimized GSM (explained further in other sections). Again the points representing
the capture ratio are marked with a small square, and this graph displays the fact that
optimized GSM can operate with a C/(I+n) ratio of approximately 9 dB (corresponding to an 8/1
power ratio between desired signal and I+n level). This low capture ratio allows closer spacing
of cells using the same carrier frequencies (for example, an n=3 instead of n=7 frequency
plan), more carrier frequencies in each cell, and thus more system capacity (at lower cost).
Another technique for optimizing the capacity of GSM is the use of overlaid cells (described
below). This provides additional capacity in the central area of each cell, and is extremely
useful when the base antennas are intentionally installed at locations with high local traffic
density compared to the traffic density near the outer boundaries of each cell.
When sectored antennas are used, GSM installations may utilize n=4 or even n=3 cell clusters
(see Figure 5). This permits either one quarter or one third (respectively) of all the carrier
frequencies to be installed in each cell. The pure spectral efficiency of GSM is designed to be
about the same as the prior European analog FM spectral efficiency, namely 25 kHz per
conversation channel, but the geographic-spectral capacity G of GSM is much better than
analog cellular.12
7.2 Methods to Further Increase GSM Capacity

When the first GSM systems were installed in 1991, only the simplest configurations were
attempted. This was necessary to simplify the debugging of the early installations by
minimizing the number of different control parameters which might affect the system
performance. For example, most of the earliest 900 MHz GSM installations did not use the
optional frequency hopping feature of GSM. Most of the descriptions of GSM system capacity
in the published literature of the early 1990s were based on these somewhat “timid”
approaches to system design. As the system designers have gained experience and fully
optimized these early installations, many of the designed-in optional capabilities of GSM
technology have been utilized to increase the capacity of GSM. In many cases, innovative
system designers have used these optional capabilities in ways which go beyond even what
the original system architects thought was possible.
Two of the most significant options which have the most significant effects of increasing GSM
capacity are, first, the combined use of discontinuous transmit with frequency hopping, and
second, the use of overlaid cells.
7.2.1 Discontinuous Transmit with Frequency Hopping

Discontinuous transmit (DTx) is a capability which is available in all GSM mobile and base
stations. When DTx is activated on a particular radio channel, the mobile (or base) transmitter
does not transmit RF bursts (with some exceptions explained below) when there is no audio at
the microphone (or the audio at the microphone is below some preset level chosen to exclude
background ambient audio noise). During intervals of substantial audio silence, the GSM
12
North American AMPS analog bandwidth is 30 kHz, in distinction to European 25 kHz analog bandwidth.
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system is designed to do several clever things to prevent negative impact on system operation.
The mobile station occasionally transmits a few burst of radio energy from time to time for the
normally required periodic transmission of call processing information contained in the so-
called GSM slow associated channel. The speech coder is designed to continue to produce
audio output (a low level audio noise signal called “comfort noise”) similar to the actual
microphone’s low audio ambient background noise level. Therefore the people engaged in the
conversation do not hear a disturbing change in background sound when the other person
speaks, compared to intervals of silence.
DTx has several system benefits. First, in the mobile station, it helps to conserve battery power
by reducing the amount of time that the transmitter operates during a conversation. Second, it
reduces the average amount of co-channel radio interference to other receivers in other cells.
All GSM systems can take advantage of the first benefit. However, it was customary in early
GSM installations to configure the frequency plan for the worst case of continuous
transmission by all mobile stations and all mobile station uplink channels transmitting
simultaneously.
In early GSM installations, mobile DTx was used almost everywhere, but base DTx was not.
Furthermore, the configuration of the frequency plan was based on the assumption that all
mobile stations transmit continuously. Although this would be a correct assumption of they all
transmit continuous digital data, it was an exercise in overly conservative design for the case
of voice, where the interfering transmitter is off for almost 50% of the time for most speakers.
Many GSM installations today are now configured to take advantage of DTx in both directions,
uplink and downlink, and the lower level of co-channel interference in both radio directions is
exploited by configuring a higher capacity frequency plan such as n=4 or n=3 instead of n=7.
Note that this exploitation of the lower average radio interference level due to DTx is extremely
similar to what CDMA does as well. IS-95 mobile stations effectively make use of DTx,
lowering the average transmit power when there is audio silence. Like CDMA, the quantitative
increase in capacity due to use of DTx in GSM is dependent on the statistical properties of the
speakers who use the system. Cellular or PCS users who speak very rapidly, who seldom
pause, or who converse in locations with extremely high audio ambient noise, will all reduce
the system capacity, for example. Mobile stations that transmit data continuously cannot
benefit in capacity from DTx, since there are no significant pauses in the operation of the
transmitter.
IS-136, the North American TDMA technology, also uses DTx at the mobile station. However,
the IS-136 standard does not require DTX or separate transmit power control for each
individual channel (time slot) at the base transmitter, and most (possibly all) existing IS-136
base equipment in fact transmits using the same power level in all time slots.
Although DTx can produce a significant increase in capacity all by itself, it has an important
synergistic effect when used in conjunction with frequency hopping.
Frequency Hopping.
As previously mentioned (and also described in the appendix), one of the main benefits of
frequency hopping in GSM is to reduce the degradation of BER due to frequency selective
multipath fading. Frequency hopping can also reduce the degradation in BER due to radio
interference as well. When the level of radio interference is different on different frequencies,
the degrading effect of the worst interference channel can be “averaged” over all other radio
conversations which it interferes with. The mechanism of this “averaging” process is due to the
same operations described in other parts of this report with regard to fading. First, the use of
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frequency hopping prevents one conversation from remaining on a particular frequency where
the interference level is worse than other frequencies. Second, even when consecutive bit
errors occur on the radio channel at one particular frequency, the mandatory process of bit
interleaving reduces the occurrence of strings of consecutive erroneous data bits. Therefore,
the GSM error protection codes can more easily correct or detect the remaining errors.
Again, there is a significant synergistic effect when frequency hopping is used in conjunction
with both mobile and base DTx. The level of radio interference varies, but is seldom at the
highest value. Therefore, the probability of a long string of consecutive bit errors on the radio
channel is reduced, which is important for good system performance.
IS-95 and IS-136 base and mobile stations cannot engage in frequency hopping. Therefore,
they cannot take advantage of this technique as GSM systems can.
Nokia has developed a proprietary adaptive control method, named Intelligent Frequency
Hopping (IFH), for optimizing system capacity by means of combined DTx and frequency
hopping. It is normally used in conjunction with Underlay/Overlay (described below). It is called
“intelligent” because it uses continual measurements of interference levels on all channels to
control the frequency hopping pattern and the assignment of new conversations in each cell to
the optimal channel. This measurement capability is inherent in the design of GSM base and
mobile receivers. The result is that interference is minimized and signal quality is optimized for
high capacity. In this way the IFH system dynamically takes advantage of the actual measured
properties of each cell and user characteristics. Its effect on capacity is described in the next
section.
Frequency hopping is not used together with CDMA, since they may be viewed as two
alternative methods of producing a so-called “spread spectrum” radio signal. If there is a desire
on the part of a system designer to further increase the spectrum bandwidth of CDMA (to
reduce the degradation from fading or from narrow band interference, for example), most
engineers agree that this can be accomplished much more simply and directly by merely
increasing the chip rate of the PN-PRBS code. This is one of the objectives of wider-band 3G
CDMA proposals, such as the proposal to use a 5 MHz bandwidth in the future instead of the
present 1.28 MHz IS-95 bandwidth. Combining DSS and frequency hopping together in the
same system would be highly complex (and therefore costly) to implement, yet is very unlikely,
on theoretical grounds, to produce a synergistic combination of effects.
7.2.2 Underlay/ Overlay

Overlaid cells (also called Underlaid/Overlaid cells, or Tiered Cells) provide extra traffic
capacity in the central portion of a cell’s area by means of additional carrier frequencies
installed in the base station of a cell but operating with lower transmit power levels than the
“normal” (full cell coverage) carrier frequencies. The basic concept of overlaid cells has been in
use in cellular systems since about 1985, but its versatility and performance has recently been
enhanced significantly as a result of a new development by Nokia.
Nokia has developed a proprietary adaptive method for optimizing the capacity and
performance of a GSM system using overlaid channels. It is named IUO (Intelligent Underlay
Overlay). This method can be used by itself, without frequency hopping and DTx, or it can be
used in conjunction with those methods. Again there appears to be a significant synergistic
effect when all of these methods are used together.
A small portion of a simple fixed channel overlaid cell plan is shown in Figure 8: Example of
Overlaid Cells. Like the previous frequency plan diagram, Figure 5, the shape of these cells is
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approximated by hexagons, although real cells are often irregularly shaped, like the outline of
a potato. Overlaid cell technology can be (and usually is) used in sectored cells, but this
diagram shows non-sectored omni-directional cells for the sake of simplicity. This figure
illustrates a full cell frequency plan using n=7 cell clusters. The number shown at the left side
of each full cell is the lead number of a sequence of carrier frequencies used in that cell. For
example, a full cell labeled 1 contains carrier frequencies 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, etc., since the n=7
cluster size implies that each 7th carrier frequency from the overall carrier frequency list is used
in that cell. These frequencies are useable in both the inner and outer parts of the cell.
In the inner part of each cell are additional carrier frequencies which are operated at lower
power and thus do not cause as much co-channel interference to other cells at the same
distance away as do the full coverage full power carriers. Therefore the frequency plan used
only in the overlaid portions of each cell could be arranged in n=3, n=2 or even n=1 clusters in
some circumstances, depending upon the path loss of the RF co-channel signals arising from
other cells in the vicinity. The figure illustrates an n=3 overlay. In the original historical design
of overlaid cells, a fixed frequency plan was used for each overlaid cell. The inner overlaid cell
labeled 3 contains carrier frequencies 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27,etc. Under this fixed
frequency plan. One of each 3 carrier frequencies is used because of the n=3 frequency
cluster size for the inner overlaid cells only. From this, we can determine that the cell having a
label 1 on the full cell and 3 on the inner overlaid cell has use of carrier frequencies 1, 3, 6, 8,
9, 12,15, 18, 21,22, 24, 27, 29, 30, etc. in the inner overlaid part. This supports much higher
traffic density in the central part of the cell.
3 1 7 1
5 3 4 3
4 2 6 2
6 1 2 1
1 3 3 3
3 2 7 2
5 1
Figure 8: Example of Overlaid Cells
In this figure, there is a cell where the full cell lead number and the overlaid inner cell lead
number are both 3 (in the lower right). In this particular cell, the useable frequencies in the
inner part are 3, 6, 9, 10, 12, 15,17, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30, 31, etc. There are a few less
frequencies available here than in the inner part of an overlaid cell having a distinct outer and
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inner lead number. Carrier frequencies 3 and 24 are only usable once (each) in this inner cell,
even though they appear on the frequency lists for both the inner overlaid cell and also the full
cell.
The example just shown in this figure shows a fixed assignment of carrier frequency. In
contrast, the Nokia IUO system may put only a portion of the indicated frequencies into action
in some cells, where it determines that the interference level for some potential channels is too
high. Or it could automatically reduce the transmit level of co-channel base and mobile
transmitters in other cells while still retaining adequate signal quality, and then put into action a
carrier frequency in the overlaid portion of another cell which is not on the lists shown in the
simple fixed frequency plan here.
Overlaid frequency plans provide very significant extra capacity when used intelligently. One
requirement is that the inner part of each cell must be geographically aligned with areas of
high traffic, and the outer “doughnut” portion of the cell must be aligned with areas of lower
traffic. Most cities do not have geographically uniform traffic density (Erlangs per square km) at
every location in the city. Areas of higher traffic (sometimes called “hot spots”) are either
predictable (places where vehicular traffic slows down, such as highway interchanges or
entrances to tunnels and other bottlenecks) or can be discovered easily from experience as
the network grows. When these hot spots have been identified, the system designer
preferentially locates base antennas at or near these “hot” locations.
Of course, when a mobile station using a carrier frequency which is only operating in the
central part of the cell moves from the inner cell area to the outer “doughnut” during a
conversation, a handover must be made between two different carrier frequencies. The
optimal method of determining the time and place of handover is very important to safely
squeeze every bit of extra capacity out of an overlaid configuration. If the handover is done
when the mobile set is too close to the center of the cell, there will be little extra capacity
achieved. Two kinds of improper handovers can occur in these older overlaid installations. If
the system attempts incorrectly to hold the mobile station on an inner part carrier frequency
when that mobile set is too far from the center of the cell, the signal quality of the conversation
will be degraded, and in some cases dropped calls will be the sad result. This is why the
adaptive or “intelligent” control of these process in the Nokia IUO system is most significant.
When overlaid cells were first used in analog cellular systems in the mid 1980s, and in most
other present applications of this same basic method, optimal control of this intra-cell handover
proved to be the most complex and difficult aspect of the problem. In analog systems, this
handover was triggered by the received signal strength indication (RSSI). However, in overlaid
systems with aggressive close-packed designs to achieve high traffic capacity, high co-
channel interference can often produce false readings of RSSI, leading to improper handovers
of both types. In short, the system operators did not have accurate site-specific control of the
boundaries between the inner and outer parts of the cell.
The Nokia IUO software control system simultaneously measures and controls several
different parameters to achieve higher capacity without degradation of the signal quality. First,
Nokia IUO controls the mobile transmitter power to achieve an adequate signal perceived at
the base receiver. However, this by itself would not be distinctive, since all other cellular and
PCS technologies also control the mobile transmitter power. The novel capabilities of Nokia
IUO include adaptive control of these additional parameters: Second, the base transmitter
power on each channel is adjusted to provide an adequate perceived signal at the mobile
receiver, and at the same time, prevent undue interference to other co-channel mobile sets in
other cells in the system. This implies that the base and mobile transmit power of the
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conversations in all other cells are also optimized in the same way as well. Third, when there is
a better set of available channels which can be used for the various conversations in progress,
the IUO software will automatically hand over some conversations to other channels so that
each conversation is on the optimal channel with regard to the level of mutual co-channel
interference in the entire system. Thus the Nokia IUO system achieves the optimal
combination of overlaid channel frequency and time slot assignments in each specific
installation, for each specific combination of local cell traffic, at all times. The increase in
capacity which results from this is far superior to a fixed frequency overlaid channel
assignment.
Nokia IUO draws on the special built-in capabilities of GSM technology. First, both GSM base
and GSM mobile receivers are able to measure RSSI and also estimate the level of BER on
both the present conversation channel and also the other frequencies and time slots which are
in action in the cell of interest and in its neighboring cells and sectors as well, regardless of the
particular frequencies used in those neighboring cells. The BER estimation arises from the
results of the error protection codes used in GSM. While IS-136 technology can also perform
similar measurements, analog cellular systems are very limited because they can only
measure RSSI, and they can only make this measurement on the current conversation
channel. IS-95 technology can measure the RSSI and estimate the BER on the current
conversation channel and also in adjacent cells when they are configured all using the same
carrier frequency. IS-95 mobile sets cannot measure or estimate the signal quality on other
frequencies (when other carrier frequencies are used in adjacent cells), which is the situation
in most 1900 MHz band IS-95 installations today.
In most cases, IUO is in use synergistically with DTx and frequency hopping. The capacity of a
system using IUO alone is typically 40% greater than an installation using only “plain vanilla”
fixed frequency plans. When IFH is combined with IUO, the typical increase in capacity is 70%.
Several important points must be emphasized.
• First, these 70% typical increases in capacity have all been demonstrated experimentally in
real installations – they are not merely theoretical or conceptual goals which have never
been achieved in the real world.
• Second, these increases in capacity are average or typical, because the exact results are
site specific and, to a certain extent, are also affected by typical speaker characteristics,
amount of audio background ambient noise in the conversation, and other cell unique
parameters. Keep in mind that some installations may have more, but some may have less,
quantitative improvement than these experimental values.
• Third, while IFH can produce increased traffic capacity throughout the cell, IUO produces
its increased capacity in the inner overlaid part of the cell only. Of course, in a properly
designed installation, this is planned to be just where it is needed.
Also, IUO only works optimally when both the base and the mobile transmit power can be
optimally controlled for individual channels. GSM is superior in this regard to both IS-136 and
IS-95. IS-136 specifications allow the mobile transmit power to be changed dynamically, but all
the time slots on the same base transmitter carrier frequency must have the same transmit
power. It is possible to attempt to optimize channel assignments to a limited degree by
grouping together all the conversations which require a lower transmit power on one carrier
frequency, and grouping together all the conversations which require a higher transmit power
on an different frequency. However, this is not as flexible as the capability of GSM to use
different transmit power for each time slot. Because of this limitation, IS-136 can use IUO to a
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limited extent, but when more different base transmit power levels are really needed than there
are available carrier frequencies, the performance is sub-optimal. Some conversations must be
assigned to a carrier frequency with a base transmit power which is higher or lower than the
optimal level. Furthermore, IS-136 does not include frequency hopping, and therefore cannot
utilize IFH.
IS-95 technology does permit limited changes in the base and mobile transmitter power level of
individual code channels, for the purpose of trying to compensate for fast multipath fading.
However, the base transmit power level (other than these intentional short term fluctuations) of
all codes in a single frequency IS-95 cell is the same. The base power level can be increased
with all code channels at the same nominal power level, in order to increase or decrease the
cell coverage, but the coverage for one code cannot be reduced while other codes cover a
larger area. Because of this, IUO technology and its resultant increases in inner cell capacity
cannot be applied to CDMA.
This is not just a present limitation of IS-95 technology, but is a more general property of
CDMA. Remember that the purpose of the intentional short term fluctuations in CDMA transmit
power, and the purpose of long term adjustments in the mobile CDMA transmitter power, have
the objective of producing (as accurately as possible) the exact same instantaneous RSSI from
all the different codes at the receiver. It is known that when one of these code signals is more
or less powerful than the others, even by so little as ±2 dB (equivalent to +58%, -37%
above/below nominal RSSI), serious degradation in BER occurs. In effect, unless all the
received code signals have the same instantaneous power, there is a degradation of the “near-
far” type. The fact that existing IS-95 installations cannot always achieve this ±2 dB target for
RSSI accuracy with their existing closed loop feedback control of transmitter power is one of
the reasons why the theoretical capacity levels cannot be achieved in practice.
For the sake of argument, if we built a special CDMA base station which transmitted different
codes at different power levels (all on the same frequency), some codes transmitted at lower
power for the intended purpose of providing an inner cell overlay, a problem would arise.
Consider a typical urban cell with a path loss of 40 dB per decade of distance. In order to
transmit two different code channels which would cover, respectively, half the cell radius and
the full cell radius, their power ratio must be 12 dB. That is, the code channel which is intended
to cover only the inner overlaid part of the cell must be transmitted from the base transmitter at
a level 12 dB lower than the code channel intended to cover the entire cell. This implies that
the ratio of mobile receiver RSSI for these two received codes is 12 dB at all distances from
the base antenna. The stronger CDMA code signal will “swamp” the weaker code signal in this
situation, making the weaker code signal unuseable. Alternatively, by using different carrier
frequencies for inner cell CDMA codes vs. full cell CDMA codes, it is theoretically possible to
install an overlaid/underlaid cell. However, the overall spectral geographic capacity G will still
be inferior to a corresponding GSM overlaid/underlaid cell pattern (as will S also), because of
the greater amount of radio spectrum used. (The problem of undesired interference between
inner cell and full cell carrier frequencies does not occur in GSM IUO because the different
channels are separated by using different carrier frequencies and/or time slots, and thus
greatly different RSSI levels can coexist at the receiver without causing degradation.)
7.3 CDMA Capacity:

CDMA proponents originally made claims of capacity, corresponding to measure G, up to 40
times greater capacity when compared to North American omnidirectional cell analog (AMPS,
n=7) cellular as the basis of comparison. Currently, the most enthusiastic proponents such as
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Qualcomm are still claiming 20 times analog capacity, while the very few quantitative
statements by system operators such as AirTouch (formerly PacTel) Cellular have claimed only
8 to 12 times analog capacity at best.
CDMA has a capacity advantage (when compared to some other non-optimized digital cellular
or PCS systems) only for voice, and then only for the n=1 cell frequency plan. When other
frequency plans are used, when the advanced methods of IUO and IFH are used with GSM, or
when data is transmitted instead of voice, there is no comparative capacity advantage13. This
is probably a surprising statement to many readers, since the impression conveyed by the
ongoing propaganda of most CDMA proponents is that there is some inherent increase in
capacity due to CDMA DSS encoding, and innovative methods of error protection coding, etc.
The importance of the silent intervals in speech, although not ignored by CDMA proponents, is
not given its due significance. Use of the n=1 CDMA frequency plan also produces other
problems as well, discussed in other sections.
When other factors (type of modulation, bit rate of speech coder, antenna and cell frequency
plan, etc.) are otherwise the same, the only remaining substantiated reason for the capacity of
IS-95 CDMA, in a one frequency (n=1) configuration, is voice-controlled discontinuous radio
transmit. A CDMA system is designed to operate with an average level of intra and inter cell
interference arising from transmitters which are turned off for about 40% to 50% of the time in
a statistically random way, due to normal pauses in speech. This allows more channels to
operate in the cell than the case of continuous transmission. When circuit switched or
synchronous data transmission occurs, the transmitter operates continuously, so the average
interference is higher and there is no extra capacity to be had from a statistically lower average
interference level. Furthermore, in installations with other frequency plans (n=2,3,4,etc.), the
value of G achieved by CDMA does not exceed GSM for either voice or data.
GSM also uses voice control of the mobile station transmit power, but unlike CDMA, the overall
radio interference design of most early GSM systems (not IFH) was based on the worst case
situation where all co-carrier frequency radios in other cells with the same carrier frequency
assignments are transmitting continuously. It is possible to exploit the lower average
interference due to GSM discontinuous transmit to get more capacity as well. To do this, one
must do three things: 1) Equip each GSM cell with extra base transceivers. 2) Use frequency
hopping to help average out the effects of intermittent cell-to-cell interference arising from
discontinuous transmit. 3) In addition to standard GSM mobile discontinuous transmit, optional
discontinuous transmit must be activated at the GSM base stations as well. The result of these
three steps is still more capacity for such GSM installations, compared to CDMA, as shown in
Table 2.
Statistically, occasional bursts of worse-than-average BER will occur in a system which is
configured for a statistically varying level of radio interference. If these occasional error bursts
are worse than the error protection coding can handle, there will be perceptable degradation of
13
Several published analyses of CDMA capacity have expressed this same conclusion:
1. Paul Newson, Mark R. Heath, "The Capacity of a Spread Spectrum CDMA System for
Cellular Mobile Radio with Consideration of System Imperfections," IEEE Journal on
Selected Areas in Communications, V. 12, No.4, May 1994, pp.673-684.
2. P. Jung, P.W. Baier, A. Steil, "Advantages of CDMA and Spread Spectrum Techniques
over FDMA and TDMA in Cellular Mobile Radio Applications," IEEE Transactions on
Vehicular Technology, V. 42, No. 3, August 1993, pp. 357-364.
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voice quality from time to time. In a GSM system of this type, there will be occasional intervals
of degraded speech coder output for individual conversations. In a CDMA system, this
degradation of speech quality will occur on all conversations in the cell when more subscribers
are momentarily speaking simultaneously than the expected average number. In some cases,
this error burst is smoothed over by the frame interpolation capability of the LPC speech coder
technology. With a small number of conversations, occasional bursts of peak interference will
statistically occur more frequently. With a larger number of conversations in the same cell, the
peak to average RF power interference ratio is smaller and these error bursts do occur less
often.
The exploitation of silent intervals in speech has been done for many decades, ever since the
installation of the Atlantic undersea telephone cable14 in the late 1950s. DSI (digital speech
interpolation) is used today on digital undersea cables and for digital telephone satellite
15
channels. In a classical digital DSI system, each channel is reassigned (by means of special
control signals) to another ongoing conversation when the earlier speaker falls silent, even for
a short time. CDMA channels are not explicitly reassigned to another conversation during brief
intervals of speech silence, but the result is much the same, namely greater conversation
capacity due to exploiting intervals of speech silence.
This greater CDMA capacity is shown in Table 2, column 3 (of 6), is 25% greater than ordinary
GSM, but it is less than GSM enhanced with IFH and IUO. Like IFH in GSM, the basic capacity
of CDMA is dependent upon unique speaker characteristics and other properties such as local
radio multipath delay spread and other site specific parameters.
7.4 Tabulated Capacity Estimates:

The design of IS-95 provides up to 62 distinct CDMA code channels in a cell, occupying a
radio bandwidth of 1.28 MHz (actually somewhat more bandwidth is used due to requirements
16
for radio guard band). Based on the limited unpublished information emerging from existing
installations, a CDMA installation using an n=1 frequency plan can support only 12 to 18 code
channels (for voice conversation traffic) per cell, or 8 to 11 data channels when no voice is
used. An n=1 frequency plan uses the same carrier frequency in all cells. This is done in the
800 MHz band CDMA test installations, but most 1900 MHz band CDMA systems use an n=7
14
Bullington, K. and Fraser, J.M., Engineering Aspects of TASI [Time Assignment Speech Interpolation – analog
predecessor of DSI], Bell System Technical Journal, v.38, 1959, p. 353.
15
DSI is already employed in undersea telephone cables and satellite transmission systems to increase capacity.
Hughes Network Systems (HNS) patented and demonstrated a TDMA explicit digital speech interpolation (DSI)
system in 1989, which increased the traffic capacity of IS-136 (the demonstration used IS-54 technology, the
predecessor to IS-136) by 25 to 80% over standard TDMA. This technology has not been further developed
commercially for both technical and competitive reasons. First, IFH already takes great advantage of silent intervals
in speech, and DSI requires changes in existing signaling and control standards and may not provide a greater
capacity. Second, all DSI systems work best statistically (very few brief blockages due to instantaneous traffic
peaks much larger than the average) with a larger traffic pool, and the use of the so-called "half rate" speech coder
provides a larger number of conversations in the same cell. HNS or others who may wish to exploit DSI technology
are apparently waiting for the official approval of a half-rate coder in the industry which is better in quality than the
present GSM half-rate coder. Third, HNS is apparently contemplating using this DSI technology as a lever to enter
the base station market, and has not licensed it to the major incumbent base equipment manufacturers nor
submitted it to standards organizations.
16
To date, Qualcomm and various system operators of CDMA have not released any "published" experimental
system capacity figures, although a number of unofficial sources such as training materials for system installers
indicate the numbers quoted here.
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frequency plan, according to industry observers. Use of n=7 reduces the system capacity, but
also greatly reduces the complexity of adjusting CDMA radio coverage when needed. Only in a
single cell CDMA system has the theoretical maximum design capacity case of 62 code
channels per cell been achieved. It has never been achieved in real multicell systems, and oly
then would CDMA achieve a theoretical capacity 13.9 times the capacity of analog cellular.
In an n=7 system (primarily used on the 1900 MHz band), more CDMA channels can be used
in each cell due to lower inter-cell radio interference. In these cases up to 40 channels are in
use in some systems. The corresponding per cell spectral capacity (corresponding to the first
term only in Eq. 3 for S) for both theoretical and two real CDMA systems, is shown in Table 2,
where the corresponding values for an n=7 AMPS and real un-enhanced and optimized GSM
systems are also shown for comparison.
Based on the real capacity of analog omni-directional cells (explained in note 1 of Table 2),
“plain vanilla” GSM has at least 2.8 times the spectral-geographic capacity of analog cellular,
and real IS-95 CDMA installations have spectral-geographic capacity which ranges from 2.26
to 3.62 times analog cellular capacity. But optimized GSM systems using IUO, or IUO together
with IFH have capacity ratios of 4 times analog and 4.9, respectively. There are other
improvements which are avaiable for GSM as well, which are not quoted in this table.
With regard to Table 2, please keep the following points in mind. All the capacity figures stated
are based on 100% voice traffic. Increases in traffic capacity due to trunking efficiency have
not been considered in this table – the capacity stated relates only to the number of channels
supported by the base system. The comparisons in this table are meaningful when the cell size
of each technology is the same. This point is justified in the next section, which notes
experimental evidence that cell size is the same or closely comparable in both GSM and
CDMA installations.
Table 2: Theoretical and Real System Capacity Comparisons
System Configuration Geo-Spectral Capacity

capacity figure: ratio to
conversations/ analog
cell/MHz cellular
Real AMPS 1/0.210 = 4.7 (or 1
n=7 (note 1) 3.45 note 1)
Real IS-95 CDMA n=4 (typically 1.9 GHz band) 40/5120 MHz = 7.8 2.26
Real GSM n=4 (no capacity enhancements) 8/800 kHz =10 2.89
Real IS-95 CDMA n=1 (typically 800 MHz band) 16/1.28 MHz =12.5 3.62
Real GSM n=4 with Nokia IUO (note 2) 11/800 kHz=13.7 4
Real GSM n=4 with Nokia IFH and IUO 14/800 kHz=17.5 4.9
Note 1: Due to the omission of certain carrier frequencies to prevent adjacent carrier frequency
interference in omni-directional adjacent cells, the actual frequency occupancy in an analog
n=7 frequency plan corresponds to one of each nine frequencies used in each cell, rather than
the one of 7 expected with full utilization. This 3.45 conversations/cell/MHz is used for further
comparisons in the text. In an analog sectored cell system, the full one of seven frequencies
can usually be used in a cell.
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Note 2: Because IUO and other overlay methods only give increased capacity in the inner part
of the cell, this number can be taken at face value only on the assumption that the designer
has properly aligned the extra capacity “hot spots” with those inner portions of the cells which
require it. In contrast, IFH adds capacity throughout the entire cell.
8 Coverage
8.1 CDMA Coverage:

Claims have been made that a CDMA cell can provide greater RF coverage area per cell (at
equal RF transmitter power), and thus the number of cells (parameter M in Eq. 3) can be
smaller. This would lead to smaller CDMA system cost compared to current experience, if true.
This claim has been attacked on theoretical grounds, particularly by Ericsson spokesmen, who
conclude that the coverage for a properly functioning CDMA system is no larger, and is
perhaps in many cases smaller, than a corresponding GSM cell. The present author tends to
agree with their view, and the little experimental information made public about working GSM
systems also appears to agree with Ericsson's analysis.
One important factor in this analysis is the extra power level needed at the outer edge of a cell
to permit the IS-95 closed loop feedback power control to operate for the purpose of
compensating for multipath fading. Proper operation of a CDMA system requires continual fine
adjustments of the mobile transmit power to compensate for fading. If this does not operate
accurately, even on just one channel, the BER of all the channels in the cell is degraded.
Consider the case of a CDMA mobile set operating at the very outer edge of the cell at
maximum transmit power. It is then given a command to briefly increase power (for some
milliseconds) to compensate for a fade, and it cannot do so because it is already at its
maximum transmit power level. As a result, the digital signal received at the base station will
then experience a high momentary BER and may be unusable. This demonstrates the
significance and necessity of the closed loop CDMA power control for the purpose of
producing clear error-free digital transmission on all the channels in a CDMA system. Analysis
of this situation by Ericsson and others indicates that useable cell size for CDMA is limited
more severely by this phenomenon than originally claimed by CDMA proponents.
Because of this, the actual cell size coverage for CDMA does not exceed similar cell coverage
for GSM or IS-136. In fact, for mobile CDMA service, the cell coverage is often smaller than a
GSM cell with similar base station transmitter power. This is in agreement with unpublished
information coming from real CDMA systems.
There is a large quantity of published material on the estimation of CDMA cell coverage, most
of it based on theoretical predictions before real systems were constructed. Much of it is
clearly inaccurate in view of subsequent experimental and field data. To briefly summarize the
present situation based on experimental and field testing, one can say that many different
factors affect CDMA cell size coverage. These factors include traffic and interference level in
adjacent cells, specific percentage use of each channel by users in each cell (individual
speaker activity factor), and site-specific multipath conditions. In general, one cannot conclude
that CDMA coverage from a base station with the same type of antenna is greater than GSM
technology coverage. For overall average comparisons with GSM or other technologies, it is
most reasonable to use the same cell size in any design estimates or comparisons.
CDMA proponents have stated that CDMA cell coverage could be greater than GSM for a WLL
system with fixed subscriber antennas. This argument is based on the fact that the range of
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instantaneous power observed in fading is less extensive for a fixed antenna, and therefore
the degradation noted by Ericsson publications is no longer so large a factor. It is true that fast
fading on a mobile radio channel is primarily due to movement of the mobile radio, so that it
encounters both faded locations and peak power locations. In wireless local loop (WLL)
installations, there is no movement of the subscriber antenna (since it is fixed to the home or
other building) and thus short-term power control is less important to compensate for fading.
However, the radio coverage range for CDMA is not increased compared to GSM. Some
fading can also arise from the motion of vehicles such as trucks (which are reflectors of radio
waves) and other vehicles in the vicinity of a stationary subscriber antenna. The major factor
affecting radio coverage in WLL systems of all technological types is the radio signal strength
at the outer edges of the cell. The path loss (relationship of signal strength to distance from the
base station) is the same for CDMA and GSM signals, and thus the cell radius and coverage
are the same for both.
Because the reflecting surface area of vehicles is smaller than the surface area of buildings
and cliffs, the quantitative amount of fading (peak to valley fade ratio) is smaller and the fading
is not so severe for WLL compared mobile/portable systems. But the problem of fading and
the need for some extra RF maximum power at the outer edge of the cell is still there, and no
clear increase in cell coverage over cells using GSM or other access technologies has been
demonstrated. In different environments (urban vs. rural, etc.) where there are different
amounts of radio obstacles (such as trees and buildings, etc.) and thus different types of path
loss, the losses and thus the cell size again are the same for both types of signal (GSM vs.
CDMA), and no advantage in cell size arises for either type of system.
In view of all of these points, we have assumed all cells for systems of different technology to
have the same size in Table 1Table 2.
9 Data Capacity
9.1 Data Protocol Support:

Both GSM and CDMA systems have and are continually improving protocol support for various
types of data and fax transmissions. There is no long term advantage of one technology, in
general, over the other for data or fax, although working GSM systems have more types of
data protocols, different data rates, and fax service available at the present time and likely for
the next few years at least. Ultimately, 5 or more years in the future, all technology types will
possibly support all data protocols equally well
9.2 CDMA Data Capacity

With present version of CDMA, the maximum user data bit rate is 9.6 kb/s. A 13 kb/s channel
rate is also supported in newer CDMA equipment, but at the cost of a somewhat worse
channel BER. It is possible to obtain a greater user bit rate by reducing the number of
channels drastically and transmitting only a limited number of codes. Using a 1.28 MHz PN-
PRBS clock rate, it is not feasible to encode a single user channel having a bit rate much
higher than about 100 kb/s without losing the actual advantages of direct spread spectrum
altogether. Of course, providing one subscriber with a higher bit rate reduces the total system
capacity for other subscribers as well. If one wishes to use the entire reserved bandwidth for
one subscriber, of course one may transmit a data bit rate of 1.28 Mb/s, but then one is not
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using spread spectrum at all, but merely encrypting the subscriber data with the PN-PRBS bit
stream and then phase modulating it onto the radio frequency carrier. Of course, using 1.28
Mb/s for one user in the cell implies that no other user on that carrier frequency can have any
channel capacity in that cell whatever.
DSS encoding of a low bit rate data signal with a high bit rate PN-PRBS bit stream provides a
so-called “spreading gain” (described in more detail below) which is approximately equal to the
ratio of the two bit rates. When we encode a 10 kb/s data bit stream with a 1000 kb/s PN-
PRBS bit stream, this ratio is 100/1 or 20 decibels. The improvement of the received signal
strength due to cross correlation at the receiver with a replica of the particular PN-PRBS
increases the decoded signal strength because all the encoding rate product bits have the
same sign during one data bit (all positive during a binary 1 bit interval, and all negative during
a binary zero interval). Meanwhile, the effect of cross correlation with signals from other
channels or with noise (provided that they are not significantly stronger than the desired signal)
is, on average, approximately zero and they do not degrade the decoded signal. If we increase
the data bit rate compared to the PN-PRBS bit rate, this spreading gain becomes smaller,
because we do not add as many pulses together during the time interval corresponding to one
data bit.
Some 3G CDMA proposals have suggest the use of a 4 or 5 MHz PN-PRBS clock rate, to be
used in conjunction with single subscriber data bit rate such as 1 Mb/s. But this is a much
lower spreading gain system than even present CDMA. In this proposal, the spreading gain is
only 5/1, or 7 dB. The BER effect of interference from other channels and from radio noise will
be much worse, so fewer channels can be used in each cell and the system will have lower
capacity. The example in the previous paragraph suggesting a 1.28 Mb/s data rate for present
day 1.28 Mb/s PN-PRBS is the extreme case of a 1/1 ratio of PN-PRBS bit rate to data rate,
corresponding to zero dB spreading gain. Because of this, a user of high bit rate data in one
CDMA cell may only be able to communicate when there are no radio channels operating in
the six cells surrounding that cell. This goes counter to the basic idea of cellular design.
However, this again raises many issues about the use of cdmaOne or CDMA-2000 in 3G
design for high bit rate digital data as noted elsewhere. There is no capacity advantage, and it
is not clear that CDMA provides any other system level advantage for continuous data
transmission. Consequently the suitability of CDMA for the proposed heavy data applications
of 3G systems is not accepted by all the players in the 3G scene.
9.3 No CDMA Capacity Advantage for Data Users:

An important related fact is that there is no corresponding increase in system capacity, due to
silent intervals, when most of the subscribers are transmitting substantially continuous bit
streams, such as fax or data transmissions. In the case of IS-95, only 8 continuous circuit-
switched data connections rather than 12 to 16 voice conversations can be supported in a
single cell. More than 8 packet data conversations may be supported as well, but the details
are not described here. This difference occurs because there are no silent intervals during
continuous data transmissions, and the system therefore cannot “time share” the use of the
channel to increase the number of separate connections or conversations. This reduction in
CDMA channel capacity is about 50% since the apparent higher capacity due to voice is the
result of typically about 40% to 50% silence during speech.
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9.4 GSM Data Capacity: Roadmap to higher data rates

The earliest data support available with GSM covered data rates up to 9.6 kb/s using a normal
single TDMA time slot (corresponding to a full rate voice channel). The gross bit rate of a full
rate channel is 22.8 kb/s, but 13.2 kb/s of that total capacity is used for error protection code to
ensure accurate transmission of the 9.6 kb/s data across the fading radio channel. Higher bit
rates can be given to a single GSM customer (for example, for extremely fast data file transfer,
or digitally coded video). The present version of GSM is actually better adapted to providing
the high bit rate by linking several channels for use of one subscriber. Of course, this reduces
the number of channels used by other subscribers. This has been demonstrated in Europe
and is now becoming available in North America as well. Many North American GSM
installations already support 14.4 kb/s data rates and higher, for example, by using 2 time slots
on the same carrier frequency. Linking seven of the time slots on one GSM carrier frequency
can readily provide a unidirectional data rate capability of approximately 64 kb/s or more. This
can be done without affecting the total system capacity and use of the other carrier
frequencies in this or other cells.
Conversely, when a low data rate is desired for applications such as remote monitoring, GSM
can provide either a full rate or a half rate (gross bit rate 11.4 kb/s) channel for this purpose.
GSM also has a further digital channel called the Standalone Dedicated Control Channel
(SDCCH) which is currently used for call setup messages and short message service (SMS).
The gross bit rate of the SDCCH is 2.85 kb/s, and up to eight different users can share a single
time slot (that is, the equivalent of a single full rate voice channel) on a carrier when using the
SDCCH channel protocol. In these two applications, the SDCCH channel is assigned and used
for only a brief time, but there is no restriction in the GSM system design to prevent a longer or
a scheduled intermittent use of that channel for various special purposes.
Because of the versatile original system design of GSM, user data rates ranging from
intermittent 1 kb/s at the low end to 64 kb/s or more at the high end are readily available with
extremely simple modifications of the present GSM system design. Many of these
modifications are backward compatible with existing hardware, and only involve software
modifications which can be downloaded to a mobile station. Multiple frequency GSM radio
receivers can also be used to get even more data rate, such as 128 kb/s or more. GSM is
therefore seen as the most flexible data platform and is expected to retain a lead for all types
and rates of data services for at least half of the next decade.
10 Quality
Quality of the information (speech or data) is the result of several factors. Error free
transmission over the fading radio channel is important. A speech coder which produces
natural sounding speech and is tolerant of digital channel error is another.
10.1 GSM Frequency Hopping and IFH

GSM frequency hopping reduces the total BER, compared to a non-frequency-hopping
installation, because the coordinated frequency hopping allows the base and mobile to use
different frequencies for each successive frame of digital information. In a typical installation
the choice of carrier frequencies can range over 5 to 20 MHz, using all the installed carrier
frequencies in a particular cell.
In a PCS-1900 installation there are typically about 15 carrier frequencies in a cell, thus
supporting about 115 conversation channels and 5 channels reserved for call setup and short
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message service. With typical delay spreads in the range of 1 to 5 microseconds for the small
cells17 used in PCS-1900, the fade coherence bandwidth ranges from 200 kHz to 1 MHz. If the
environmental clutter profile is simple, multiple fades at different frequencies due to different
geometric ray paths are less likely. Therefore, it is likely that only one or two out of the 15
carrier frequencies in that cell is subject to a fade at a particular place and time.
In such a situation, GSM frequency hopping, together with the pre-existing bit interleaving and
error correction codes of GSM, will achieve accurate digital transmission. Frequency hopping is
particularly effective for hand held portable mobile sets, of the type used almost universally in
PCS-1900 installations, because these sets are normally stationary or moving only at
pedestrian speeds (0 to 5 km/h, corresponding to 0-3 mi/h, the speed of vigorous walking).
If a non-hopping handset is stationary at the location of a fade on its operating carrier
frequency, or if it is subject to strong radio interference on that particular frequency, all the
digital bits may be corrupted (that is the worst case of a 50% BER). In contrast to that,
frequency hopping avoids that bad carrier frequency most of the time (perhaps 14 of each 15
radio bursts). Thus the level of un-correctable bit errors can be reduced to a fraction of a
percent. In contrast to this, fast moving vehicle-mounted mobile stations normally experience
fast fading at all times (except when the vehicle stops!). In this latter situation, the use of
frequency hopping still makes a small improvement, but does not make the dramatic
improvements which are apparent for stationary handset or single frequency interference
situations.
Some further information about fading is given in the Appendix.
10.2 CDMA Speech Quality:

Repeated claims have been made that CDMA has better perceived speech quality, measured
by such things as mean objective score (MOS) speech quality evaluations produced by a panel
of listeners. In general, due to the rapid and continuing advance in speech coder technology,
at every date one may say that the most recent speech coder design is the best quality speech
coder design. When CDMA first was demonstrated using a coder designed in 1990, it had
better quality than digital speech coders used in competitive systems, which had been
designed in 1986 and 1984 respectively. However, all of these were adequate for their
purpose. In practice, CDMA has not demonstrated any significant advantage over GSM with
regard to this item, and recent introduction of the GSM EFR speech coder has reversed the
previous speech quality rankings of GSM and CDMA. GSM now has the best quality speech
coder.
The GSM EFR speech coder sets a standard so close to standard wired telephone quality that
major differences in the quality of future speech coders are not expected, although gradual
improvement in the error sensitivity is expected. In the long term, one can expect each system
to be upgraded to the latest and best available speech coder, so that this should not be viewed
as a long-term distinguishing feature of either technology.
17
Because of the low power handsets used in PCS-1900 and DCS-1800, cell diameter seldom exceeds 4 to 5 km.
On the 900 MHz GSM band, much higher power mobile stations may be used in vehicles, and cells can be 30 km
otr more diameter, particularly in sparsely populated rural areas.
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10.3 CDMA Sensitivity to Intermodulation (IM):

Because a CDMA receiver has a large bandwidth and must provide more amplification of the
low spectral power density of the wider bandwidth CDMA signal, it is also more sensitive to
inter-modulation (IM) than a narrow band receiver. IM is a non-linear interaction and distortion
of the desired signal waveform due to a strong interference signal. IM sensitivity is a
fundamental problem for CDMA in any environment where strong undesired interference
signals are present. It is not easily corrected by a simple modification of the hardware design.
Many avenues of research are underway using active signal cancellation and other measures
to try to find a novel and practical way to reduce IM in broadband CDMA receivers.
IM has proven to be a serious problem for CDMA installations on the 800 MHz cellular band,
and is reputed to be the main problem holding back the widespread implementation of CDMA
on that band. Presence of a narrow bandwidth high power interference signal prevents
reception on all the CDMA code channels present at that frequency. It is true that these narrow
band interference signals which plague such CDMA installations arise from faults in the pre-
existing analog cellular equipment, such as narrow-band IM from nearby base stations and the
like. However, the fact that this interference should not be present on legal grounds does not
forgive the real practical problems it produces for CDMA.
In contrast, TDMA systems such as IS-136 or GSM can avoid such narrow band interference
signals by merely using a frequency plan which avoids the interference signals in the cells
where they occur, or in the worst situation, omitting one frequency in a particular cell, where
necessary. Occasionally such problems may arise on other bands as well, typically due to
other narrow band radio sources such as police or microwave radio signals. CDMA sensitivity
to IM is not a constant problem affecting all installations, but it is a risk which may cause
significant delay and cost in the installation and debugging of some CDMA system, and in the
worst cases prevent the successful operation of CDMA on some bands
10.4 CDMA C/(I+n) and Spreading Gain:

When we wish to express the relationship between BER and C/(I+n) for CDMA, it is useful to
consider two kinds of interference. One type of interference is completely un-correlated with
(that is, orthogonal to) the PN-PRBS code component of the desired CDMA signal. When two
completely uncorrelated waveforms are multiplied together, the product waveform has a zero
time average value. That is another way to say that the two waveforms are orthogonal or
completely uncorrelated. We describe this by saying that the cross correlation coefficient
between the two waveforms is zero.
The second type of interference is completely correlated. That is, it has exactly the same PN-
PRBS code as the desired signal – a case which should only theoretically arise from mutual
interference of two channels using the same PN-PRBS code in two different cells. A
completely correlated pair of signals are either exactly identical or one is the exact inverse (in
NRZ waveforms, one waveform is the polarity inverse of the other.) These two cases have
cross correlation coefficients of +1 or –1 respectively.
Other cases of interference may be viewed as intermediate in absolute magnitude of the
correlation coefficient between these two extremes of 1 and zero. It is also informative to
consider the intermediate case of a PN-PRBS code which is 50% correlated with the desired
signal's PN-PRBS code, and various other amounts of partial correlation. In a 50% correlated
PN-PRBS interfering signal, some (but not all) of the bits are exactly like the corresponding bits
of the desired signal, and other bits are opposite the corresponding bits of the desired signal.
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The cross correlation coefficient is either +0.5 or -0.5, depending on the overall polarity of one
waveform relative to the other. Given a first specific bit stream, only one specific second bit
stream has a correlation coefficient of +1 relative to that first specific bit stream. Its inverse is in
turn the only waveform which has a correlation coefficient of -1 relative to the first specific bit
stream. On the other hand, many different PN-PRBS bit streams are half correlated or un-
correlated with one particular PN-PRBS bit stream, because these matching bits do not need
to occur in any particular time order or grouping. These intermediate cases are interesting to
examine because the actual set of PN-PRBS codes used in IS-95 are effectively not always
perfectly orthogonal over every data bit interval, particularly due to such conditions as radio
multipath propagation, and the presence of signals from other cells or excessive number of
channels temporarily in use in the same cell.
Approx BER dB S/N at detector not based on precise
data. Do not use
30 for design.
0.1%
A CDMA with PN-
1% 20 PRBS clock 100 times
data clock,
10% uncorrelated
10 interference
50%
B CDMA, approx.
0 50% correlated
interference
-10 C CDMA, 100%

correlated
interference
-20 -10 0 10 20 30 dB
Figure 9: CDMA C/(I+n) for Various Degrees of Interference Correlation
Figure 9 shows that the C/(I+n) ratio for a completely un-correlated (orthogonal) PN-PRBS
encoded interfering channel (curve A) can actually be 20 dB lower than the acceptable C/(I+n)
for a fully correlated interfering channel (curve C) having the same PN-PRBS code. The
reason is, of course, that the effect of the un-correlated or orthogonal code is "averaged out" in
the decoding process. This apparent 20 dB increase in performance is called "spreading gain"
and is the result of using 100 times as much bandwidth with CDMA as the signal data rate
would require with ordinary coding and modulation.
The spreading gain is the same number as the ratio of the PN-PRBS bit rate to the data clock
bit rate. This ratio is approximately 100 to 1 for real IS-95 CDMA (corresponding to 20 dB
since 10*log(100) = 20), but the ratio is 10 to 1 (only 10 dB) for the example waveforms in
Figure 3. So long as we use other CDMA signals having PN-PRBS codes which are all
orthogonal to each other, we are able to operate with very low mutual interference, as
illustrated by curve A in Figure 9.
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One problem with real CDMA systems is that, for various practical reasons, we cannot use
perfectly orthogonal encoding waveforms. Furthermore, other non-orthogonal interfering
signals are produced due to multipath delay (although this is somewhat ameliorated by the
RAKE receiver described below). Interference from other cells which use non-orthogonal PN-
PRBS signals, and other true noise sources increase the effective “noise floor” The noise floor
is the effective amount of background noise from which the signal must be extracted. Also, in
real CDMA systems, all the different mobile transmitted channel signals are not
instantaneously at the same receive signal strength at the base receiver, and the signals which
momentarily have lower received signal levels experience worse BER than the good signals.
They therefore are better described by an intermediate curve such as curve B.
10.5 So-called "Graceful Degradation" and "Breathing Cells":

CDMA proponents have described the mutual interference effect between all the encoded
channels in a cell or between encoded channels in adjacent cells in some rather unique ways.
First, they make the point that the over-provisioning of a cell with more than the theoretical
maximum number of orthogonal PN-PRBS codes will lead to a gradual or "graceful"
degradation of the BER as more traffic is carried in the cell. This is in contrast to the
interference which occurs on only one carrier frequency in GSM when only one significant
interfering radio signal penetrates a cell.
The clear implication of this approach by CDMA proponents is that there will be a slight
degrading effect on all users, rather than a serious or debilitating interference effect on one
user. Although the effect of over-provisioning interference is indeed gradual and is indeed
spread over all users when expressed in terms of BER, there is a widespread qualitative
misunderstanding of its effect on voice and data transmission.
The error protection coding used with digitally coded speech and for digital subscriber data or
fax works in this way: The error protection code, and the capability of the voice coder to bridge
over short gaps in accurate speech coder data, allows the channel to continue to operate more
or less satisfactorily up to a maximum BER of about 4 or 5% (depending upon the details of
the time pattern of the bit errors). Above this level of BER, the speech coder produces silence
(and the radio channel will ultimately automatically disconnect due to continuous erroneous
signals) and similar loss of data or fax communication will occur on all channels. Thus, the
ultimate effect of serious interference in a CDMA system may, in fact, be more widespread
than in a GSM technology system, affecting all the users in a cell rather than just a few. This is
an inherent system property of CDMA, and is a manifestation of the so-called “graceful
degradation” of CDMA, which in fact, due to the properties of digital speech coders, is not so
“graceful” after all! The bit error rate does degrade gradually and about equally on all code
channels, but the speech coder still has an abrupt cutoff point where it cannot continue to
function.
CDMA proponents also state that, under conditions of high radio interference in one cell, a
CDMA system can handover some of its users from that cell to another immediately adjacent
cell which is free of such interference. (This discussion applies to n=1 frequency plans.) This
ability of a CDMA system to effectively shrink or increase the short term coverage area by
handing over the mobile stations in the outer part of a cell, is described as "breathing" cells.
Cells are said to expand or contract, like the breathing lungs of a person, as required by local
interference conditions.
Again, the details of field tests indicate that there are significant complications with this
process. In order to provide a large area of overlapping radio coverage between adjacent cells
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to facilitate "breathing" cells, the base radio transmitter power must be increased in both
adjacent cells. This increases the interference between code channels in the two cells, thus
reducing the initial capacity of each cell. If an “ordinary” cell can accommodate 18
conversations, a cell which is involved in this “high overlap” situation can accommodate
perhaps only 7 conversations. This is illustrated in Figure 10(a). In the crescent shaped
overlapping area, there mutual radio interference from the two base stations is possible under
the following conditions. Any momentary correlation between the PN-PRBS codes of two
channels in these two cells, respectively, will produce a momentary high BER condition. In
contrast, one can configure the system by reducing the base transmit power at the two cells,
thus reducing the inter-cell interference and allowing more channels to operate without
interference in each cell, but sacrificing the so-called "breathing" capability. The latter case
also leaves the region where two neighboring cells meet with minimal signal strength and
quality from either of the two base stations. As a result, even the “soft handover” method
described below will not produce good communication, and users in the mutual boundary
regions are likely to be unexpectedly disconnected. This situation is illustrated in Figure 10 (b).
Region where high Region where call

mutual interference may be lost during
is possible. handover.
(a) Cells configured with large (b) Cells configured with no

overlap to facilitate “breathing.” overlap to maximize channel
capacity in each cell.
Figure 10: Cells configured to permit “Breathing,” or conversely, Higher Capacity
It should also be noted that exactly the same relationship between adjacent cell radio overlap
and the ability to perform inter-cell handover to respond to unexpected interference occurs in
GSM and other technologies as well, with the same undesirable increase in co-channel
interference between different cells due to larger base station transmitter power.
So-called "breathing" cells have been presented by CDMA proponents as the answer to the
possible (but actually very rare) problem of a "rogue" CDMA mobile station whose
malfunctioning transmitter transmits at an excessive power level and which therefore causes
"near-far" interference with all the other CDMA channels in the cell. The "rogue mobile"
problem is more serious for CDMA than the related rogue mobile problem for GSM or other
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technologies, since the CDMA rogue mobile kills all other channels, while the GSM rogue
mobile affects only one carrier frequency.
On the whole, the problem itself is so seldom encountered that no real CDMA system is set up
to provide "breathing" cells, since it would reduce the capacity so severely throughout the
system. There is effectively a “domino effect” in which excessive traffic in one cell causes
handovers to adjacent overlapping cells, and the resulting excess traffic in each of the
adjacent overlapping cells causes further handovers, and so forth. This is more of a point in
the so-called "theological debate" between CDMA proponents and other technology
proponents than a realistic issue, but it is mentioned so frequently in the literature that it is
necessary to comment on it.
10.6 CDMA Sensitivity to Multipath Delay Spread:

Early in the development of CDMA, proponents made early claims that CDMA, unlike GSM and
other TDMA systems, was immune to inter-symbol interference (ISI), which is another
consequence of multipath propagation (in addition to multipath fading). The multipath delay
spread in most cells is longer in duration than the time interval of one PN-PRBS bit. Therefore,
the delayed multipath copies of the same signals are uncorrelated with the desired received
signal, and appear to a CDMA receiver like other CDMA signals, having a different PN-PRBS
bit sequence. They therefore add to the un-correlated or partly correlated interference level
(the “noise floor”) in the cell, just like having additional transmitters present using other code
channels.
Because of the time delay, these multipath signals do not have their PN-PRBS bit stream
properly synchronized with the decoder, but they do add to the variation of the detector output
above and below the voltage level for the correct data bit value. Their presence therefore
increases the BER of all other receivers. The practical solution to this problem due to
multipath propagation for CDMA is the use of an adaptive equalizer in both mobile and base
CDMA receivers. This was perhaps a bitter pill for the CDMA proponents, because they
initially claimed that CDMA, unlike TDMA systems like GSM, would not need an equalizer.
The particular type of adaptive equalizer used in IS-95 CDMA has the special name, "RAKE"
receiver, because of its similarity to an adaptive equalizer of the same type used in radar
systems. However, when one examines the operations and complexity of a CDMA RAKE
receiver, it is clear that it does the same things as a GSM adaptive equalizer, and is similar in
complexity, power consumption, and other significant parameters. A RAKE receiver is an
equalizer which generates multiple delayed copies of the received radio waveform. In CDMA
receivers this delay is accomplished by sampling and digitizing the received waveform at an
appropriate sample rate, and then storing the samples in digital memory. The sample values
are retrieved at a later time, when needed, to produce the desired amount of delay. These
delayed digital samples can then be added or subtracted with each other to cancel (or at least
reduce the amplitude of) delayed components of the signal which appear in the received
waveform due to multipath delays.
The standard CDMA design calls for only 4 delayed copies of the received signal (each copy is
called a "finger" of the RAKE, for historical reasons). The amount of delay of each finger is
adjustable, and the value of each finger signal may be added or subtracted after multiplying it
by a coefficient adjusted to optimize the resulting output signal. A properly functioning RAKE
receiver applies large delays to the finger signals which contain “early” copies of the desired
radio waveform. It applies short delays to the finger signals which contain “later” delayed
copies of the desired radio waveform. The result is that each of the finger signals then have
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the major component of the desired signal in good time synchronization vis-à-vis the chip rate.
If a particular signal has the wrong polarity, it is subtracted. If it has the correct polarity, it is
added. The result is a re-enforcement of the desired signal despite the multipath delay which
occurs in space between the transmitting and receiving antennas. This is very similar to the
operations which occur in certain types of adaptive equalizers used on other radio
technologies, despite the different names “adaptive equalizer” versus “RAKE receiver.”
Unfortunately, one of the undesirable results of using the RAKE receiver during soft handover
(described below) is that at least 2 and in some case 3 of its fingers are occupied with delayed
signals which are not the result of multipath radio propagation, but are signals from a second
or third base station participating in the soft handover. During this interval, which may be a
large portion of the total conversation, the equalizer is not able to correct for multipath
propagation and multi-cell delayed signals at the same time, so the signal to noise ratio and
the BER performance both deteriorate somewhat. This is one of several cases in which the
design of CDMA in IS-95 incorporates complex equipment which is not always utilized to full
technical or economic advantage.
The bottom line is that there is no particular inherent advantage for either CDMA nor GSM with
regard to its sensitivity to multipath and ISI, and with regard to the complexity or cost of the
equipment which the system uses to combat this problem.
10.7 Error Protection Code Equally Good for CDMA and GSM:
The second most effective method to address the problem of fading is to design the digital
encoding for transmission with both extra bits used for error protection codes and bit
interleaving to prevent long sequences of erroneous bits. Both GSM and CDMA do these
things rather well, but neither technology is significantly better than the other with regard to
anti-fade or interference caused bit errors.
11 CDMA Soft Handover:

Soft handover is used only in CDMA systems having n=1 frequency plans. It is less often used
in the 1900 MHz band because most of these installations do not use n=1 frequency plans.
Instead of abruptly disconnecting the radio connection to the old cell and continuing with a
radio connection to the target handover cell only, the mobile station engaged in soft handover
remains in communication with both base stations (or in some special geographical cases,
three base stations) for some interval of time. Eventually the old base station stops
communicating with the mobile station and the handover is complete. More details are
described below in the section on Penalties of Soft Handover.
Soft handover, according to the designers of the Qualcomm IS-95 standard, was intended to
provide special protection against loss of a connection at handover time, and to prevent a gap
in the audio during handover.
Soft handover is open to several criticisms, most of which have been amply repeated by the
severe critics of CDMA:
1. It is an overly complicated solution to a problem which is not significant in other systems
such as GSM. It is an over-reaction to a misunderstood cause of a minor problem, or it is a
complicated solution to a problem which is already solved.
2. It adds significantly to the cost of the system hardware, and particularly to the cost of digital
links between individual CDMA base stations and the central CDMA MSC switch.
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3. It does not increase the performance of the system, and in fact it decreases the
performance of some of the other aspects of the CDMA system (for example, the RAKE
receiver equalizer) during soft handover.
There was and is a genuine “gap” problem with analog cellular handovers. There is an audible
loss of speech for about 0.2 seconds or more in analog cellular systems at handover time,
which is sometimes perceived as a click. Also, in analog systems with faulty RF coverage, calls
may be lost when a handover is attempted. This occurs because the radio signal coverage is
not good in some parts of some installations. Therefore the cellular system will automatically
drop a call if the analog supervisory tone (inaudible to the human subscriber) or the
corresponding identification data (CDVCC code in IS-136 or Synch-training bit pattern in GSM)
is wrong or missing for 5 seconds or more. Handovers can also fail if there is no available
traffic channel in the target handover cell. In view of the system resources devoted to soft
handover in CDMA, some industry observers have surmised that the designers of IS-95 CDMA
perceived the problem of dropped calls as a problem with handover. The underlying causes of
dropped calls, whether occurring at handover or not, are in fact:
1) Inadequate radio coverage at the outer edges of the cell, or bad coverage areas due to
shadowing by hills, buildings, etc.
2) Inadequate traffic capacity in a target cell.
The correct solution to problem 1 is to provide adequate radio coverage wherever necessary.
The correct solution to problem 2 is to provide adequate traffic channel capacity in all cells of
the system.
In a properly configured system with proper RF coverage (and any access technology, whether
analog, CDMA or GSM) there are no significant dropped calls due to handovers. Handover in a
GSM (or other TDMA) system has no inherent gap in the audio, because the carrier frequency
change occurs during the idle time slots of the TDMA frame, between two regularly scheduled
uses of the mobile station’s assigned time slot. Therefore the digitally coded bit stream is
usually received without interruption. This is called "seamless" handover.
A GSM handover between the old base station and the target base stations which differ in
distance from the mobile station by over approximately 1 km theoretically requires some loss of
digital data. This happens because the mobile must transmit a special short radio burst just
after changing to the new carrier frequency. The purpose of this short burst is to let the base
station measure the radio signal propagation delay and then send an appropriate timing
adjustment signal to the mobile station. Theoretically, a frame of speech coding may be lost
while the mobile station is engaged in this synchronization adjustment. The time duration of
each data bit in GSM is about 3.7 microseconds. A timing change of less than 1.5
microseconds is too small to affect the receiver timing adjustment. Since the radio signal delay
due to the speed of light is 3 microseconds per km, a timing accuracy specifying the delay
accurate to 1.5 microseconds, corresponding to an accuracy of ± 0.5 km, is adequate for this
purpose.
In practice, this theoretical gap in the data stream seldom if ever occurs for GSM or other
TDMA technologies. When the distance from the handover point18 (or the cell boundary line) to
the target base station is known by the system operator, a preset timing adjustment parameter
18
Some system operators set different handoff distances for different power classes of GSM mobile stations, so
that a different timing adjustment parameter may be used for these different power classes of mobile stations.
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can be used in the handover command sent to the mobile station. This parameter causes
immediate adjustment of the mobile transmitter burst timing during handover, and
consequently the transmission of the bit stream continues without interruption. This is the usual
“seamless” handover for GSM. This occurs for most handovers in a properly engineered GSM
system. The system engineers can easily find the proper value of the preset timing adjustment
parameter by performing a few trial handovers of the short burst type at several points along
the mutual boundary between each two cells in the system. The timing adjustment determined
by the system in this case is the proper value to send to other mobile stations located at this
boundary when sending the handover command, to achieve a seamless handover.
When a handover occurs between the inner and outer part of an overlaid or tiered cell, the
distance from the base station is exactly the same both before and after the handover.
Therefore, the handover command is preset to leave the timing adjustment unchanged, and
there is no possible gap in the received channel bit stream.
What about the worst GSM case? There are some cases in which short radio bursts must be
sent to establish synchronization. This occurs where the system operator has not sent a
preset timing parameter because the boundary between two cells is not a relatively uniform
distance from the target cell. In particular, the distance to the target base station varies by
more than a kilometer at different places along the handover line. Examples of this occur
almost exclusively in very large rural cells in European or Australian 900 MHz GSM
installations. Because the cells are smaller than 3 km radius in PCS-1900 systems, this
situation is practically unheard of in North America. Therefore, from a practical point of view,
every handover which one will encounter in a North American PCS-1900 system will be a
seamless (preset timing adjustment) handover. The “worst case” is almost never seen.
However, in such a worst case, some data is indeed lost, perhaps as much as a full speech
data frame of 20 milliseconds. But the speech coding system can bridge over relatively short
(approximately 20 to 100 milliseconds) gaps in speech coder data. Audio sound is repeated
from the previously received accurate 20 ms speech coder data frame. The treatment of a
single 20 millisecond gap is almost imperceptibly good. Longer gaps produce sometimes
perceptible effects on the speech, and sometimes imperceptible. There is no “click” or any of
the artifacts which occur in an analog handover. In the worst case the continuity of speech is
not quite as good as a soft handover, but the worst case rarely occurs in a well engineered
system.
The problem of dropped calls due to lack of traffic capacity in the target cell or faulty RF
coverage can occur also in a CDMA system suffering from these flaws, and restoring
performance of such a CDMA system requires revising the RF coverage and cell channel
capacity of the system. Soft handover does not solve nor prevent this problem for CDMA
systems.
11.1 Penalties of Soft Handover:

Soft handover is an interesting and clever concept, but many critics view it as a excessively
expensive and complicated means (in terms of both operational resource and dollar cost) of
solving an actually in-significant problem of competing digital technologies. It also produces a
complex system-wide interaction between cell power and RF coverage and cell capacity, which
is very difficult to optimize in real systems.
In order to perform soft handover, the total channel processing hardware and data link
hardware between all base stations and the central switch of a CDMA system must be
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provisioned with much greater capacity than for a hard handover system. In a typical CDMA
installation, between 30% and 80% of all conversations at any time are engaged in a 2-base
(or occasionally a 3-base) communication. That is, they are in the process of soft handover but
the connection to the original cell has not yet been broken. This is another one of the reasons
why the cost of a CDMA system is typically 30% to 60% higher per conversation channel than
the cost of GSM.
Thus, in an n=1 CDMA frequency plan, the cost of each base station can be as much as 60%
to 100% greater than a GSM system. These cost comparisons are even less favorable to
CDMA when data transmission is compared, rather than voice. Soft handover does not occur
in CDMA installations having other frequency plans (for example n=4 or n=7) or for a WLL
installation. In such installations, it is not necessary to install as much link hardware between
the base stations and the central switch. However, the cost of the base stations already
incorporates the extra hardware which was designed to handle soft handover, even though it is
not exercised in these latter installations, and the capacity is no longer superior to GSM.
Therefore the cost of the system is still at least 30% greater (and often much greater indeed)
per conversation channel than GSM or other technologies.
Another difficulty with soft handover arises from the interaction of the short term power control
feedback loop. The base station is continually sending power control commands to the CDMA
mobile station to attempt to compensate for fast fading. These power commands are based on
a feedback control loop which orders the mobile to increase its power when there is a drop in
received signal strength perceived at the base receiver, and vice versa. This is done essential
in order to minimize the near-far problem with signals from many different mobile stations
arriving at the base receiver.
Any inaccuracy in this control process is well known to cause a serious degradation of channel
BER. However, when the mobile station is in a soft handover, it is communicating with two
(and in some cases, three) different base stations. These two base stations are so far apart
that in general the time pattern of fading at the two base receivers is not correlated (that is,
only 50% correlation or 0.5 magnitude of the cross correlation coefficient of the two received
signal strength profiles19). One base station receiver may experience a short term fade for this
channel, and thus will request that the feedback command should command the mobile station
to increase its power. At the same time the other base station may simultaneously experience
a brief peak of received power, and therefore wants to see a decrease in mobile transmitter
power. There are also moments in time when both base station experience simultaneous
fades, and also moments when both experience simultaneous peaks of received power. The
system design of CDMA resolves these conflicting requests when they occur by commanding a
mobile transmitter power increase only when both base stations simultaneously request an
increase. In the other cases, when either one requests a decrease in mobile transmit power,
the mobile station is commanded to decrease its transmitter power. This first requires that the
control signals be brought from both (or from three) base stations to the central controller at
the MSC, and then a power control decision is made there. The resulting command is sent out
to both (or three) base stations, where it is transmitted via radio to the same mobile station.
This requires low-delay high bit rate control links between all the base stations and the MSC
modules.
19
This is not the cross correlation of the two PN-PRBS bit streams, which is a completely different waveform. The
fluctuations in the received signal strength profile varies at a rate dependent on the motion (if any) of the mobile
station, but is typically about 2 or 3 fades per second for a pedestrian. The waveform fluctuations in the PN-PRBS
occur at 1.28 Mb/s as described previously.
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In addition, the outgoing digitally coded speech must be transmitted from the MSC to both (or
three) base stations. Furthermore, the incoming (uplink) digitally coded speech signal which is
received at both base stations must be transmitted from there via digital channels to the CDMA
control module located at the MSC. At that location, the BER of each of the two received
digitally coded speech signals is evaluated, based on the error detection digital codes which
are normally included with the basic coded speech bits. If the two (or three) base receivers
differ in estimated BER, only the better (or best) of the two (or three) is processed through the
speech decoder to be heard by the person at the other end of the conversation. This requires
additional low delay high bit rate digital traffic links between all the base stations and the MSC
modules.
CDMA proponents claim that the selection of the better or best signal in this way is a form of
receive diversity. Receive diversity is a method of increasing the received signal quality in the
presence of fading by selecting the better signal from two different receiving antennas, which
are located at different places and therefore seldom both have simultaneous fading. CDMA
proponents claim that this compensates for the degradation of signal quality which occurs
when one of the base stations asks for a mobile power increase but instead gets a decrease
during soft handover. CDMA opponents point out that this two-base-site diversity is not as
effective as the simpler switching diversity used in some GSM base station receivers. It is also
not amenable to other even more effective types of receive diversity, such as equal gain
diversity or maximal ratio diversity.
There are several important differences between the two diversity systems which CDMA
proponents try to present as equivalent. Here is a brief and simplified summary of the more
important differences:
In standard switching diversity, two receive antennas are located at the same base station.
They are separated by typically 8 wavelengths or more, to produce un-correlated fading. The
stronger signal is selected. Nothing is done in this process to intentionally degrade the signal
of either of the two receivers. No signals from a different cell site are involved.
In contrast to that, during CDMA soft handover, two receive antennas are located at a very
large distance corresponding to two separate base stations. (In most installations, each
receiver has two antennas and makes a pre-selection of the best signal before the further
processes. We will ignore that for the moment.) The cross correlation coefficient of the fading
profile for these two antennas is about the same as the cross correlation coefficient for two
antennas on the same base station. Further separation of the receiving antennas – a
separation of many km as opposed to several meters -- does not change the cross correlation
coefficient of the fading profiles. It is about 0.5 in either case. In contrast to standard switching
diversity, the better signal from the two base stations is chosen based on estimated BER
rather than signal strength. There is little argument about this aspect of the process. However,
it does not increase the performance of the uplink channel significantly compared to using
standard receive diversity at one base station. One reason for this is that on some occasions
the signal strength at one of the two base receivers is degraded because of the design choice
which forbids increasing the mobile transmitter power unless both base stations request this
simultaneously. There is a valid reason for this design choice. By always using a lower mobile
transmit power in case of conflicting fade conditions at different base stations, the level of RF
interference with other channels, which would occur in some cases when the mobile transmit
power is temporarily increased. But the final result is that there is a very slight improvement of
performance and a very large increase in the complexity and cost of the system.
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Without going into all the details, there are valid cost and complexity reasons why the other
more effective diversity algorithms mentioned earlier (equal gain or maximal ratio) are not used
in a soft handover configuration. Their use would improve the receiver performance only
slightly, but would increase the system cost far more. Upon reviewing all of these alternatives,
one naturally questions the added system cost in terms of its payoff in system performance.
This is one of the most questionable aspects of soft handover in the views of several
observers.
Furthermore, if conventional diversity were not used at each cell, the performance of the
system when a mobile set is not engaged in soft handover would be far inferior to competitive
systems. CDMA systems operating on the 1900 MHz band do not use n=1 frequency plans, so
they all use hard handover with no apparent problems. When everything is considered, it
appears that a CDMA system designed specifically without soft handover (and thus without all
the extra hardware and processing capacity used exclusively by soft handover) would be a
desirable modification of CDMA infrastructure. However, at this time all IS-95 CDMA systems
have soft handover built in to be compatible with the existing standard.
Finally, we should mention among the other penalties of CDMA soft handover, that in the 800
MHz band, it is necessary to install CDMA base equipment in all the cells of a city, even
though extra capacity may be needed in only a few cells of the system and dual mode (analog-
CDMA) handsets are used. In contrast, in a 800 MHz band installation, IS-136 TDMA base
equipment may be installed in only those cells which need extra capacity, and standard dual
mode analog-TDMA handsets may be used. The capital cost to the system operator is much
lower in the TDMA case. (Of course, there are no systems on the North American 800 MHz
band using dual mode analog-GSM handsets with GSM base stations, so this point is not
directly applicable to GSM.)
12 Implementation & Hardware
12.1 CDMA Technical and Engineering Effort:

Early on, claims were made by CDMA proponents that a CDMA system could be installed with
"no frequency planning" (for n=1 frequency plans) and the claim was repeatedly made that
significantly less staff would be required since soft handover was claimed to compensate for
sloppy or incomplete RF coverage. In fact, experience and field testing has shown that the
effort and complexity of adjusting RF coverage, particularly in an n=1 frequency plan, is equal
to or far greater than the corresponding work to properly adjust RF coverage in a GSM system.
This is measured by the number of engineers and technicians needed, the need for detailed
field measurements of RF signal strength and quality, and the time required to make the
necessary adjustments. The cost of this effort, devoted to staff salaries, test equipment, and
related support, is one important reason why the true operational cost of CDMA system is
higher than or equal to that of GSM systems.
12.2 Data Communication and Related Features

Both GSM and CDMA have certain basic data communication capabilities today. The most
significant of these is SMS. However, GSM already has circuit switched data communication
capabilities including interworking with land-based data terminals and fax machines, while
these capabilities are still in the works or in testing stages for CDMA. Industry standard packet
switched data communication is also appearing already for GSM.
gsmcdma.doc
GSM system developments have included a number of specific improvements which allow for
non-proprietary interworking with various data bases and data systems. GSM permits the
downloading of software upgrades to the mobile set or to the SIM card which identifies the
subscriber. Sophisticated GSM handsets such as the Nokia 9000 permit one to carry a pocket
computer with telephone and data communications capabilities. In general GSM is ahead of
CDMA in both the variety and the level of multi-vendor standardization of data communication
capabilities.
Qualcomm announced in November 1998 a proprietary data communications package
developed jointly with Microsoft, which requires a special handset and will be available on
many base systems in the coming months. This software package provides features similar to
Microsoft Outlook Explorer, such as a calendar, e-mail, contact manager, and the like, and
must be used with Microsoft software in other systems as well.
On a long term basis, the raw data communications capability for both circuit switched and
packet switched data communication will undoubtedly be available in both technologies. The
difference in the design approaches of the two camps appears to be developing in the
following way. GSM developers appear to concentrate on industry standard data
communications capabilities which act as platforms, on which many developers can use to
support a variety of competitive software offerings. CDMA development appears to be focused
today on a complete vertically integrated software package. Although this discourages a
variety of independent software developers to supply software to work with it, their hope is
apparently that they can build on the near market monopoly of Microsoft in some areas. While
it is true that Microsoft has a near monopoly on operating systems, the do not have the only
popular schedule, e-mail and contact manager software, so the correctness of this partnering
strategy remains to be seen.
A further open question, in the mind of this author, is the actual attractiveness of elaborate
data communication and other features in a radio handset. Which data communication
capabilities are useful and which are un-necessary? Due to its small physical size and the fact
that most users are continually in motion when using their handset, many applications requiring
a large display screen are impractical. Video as an entertainment and two-way conference
medium in this context is a highly questionable product. Therefore, the more grandiose
schemes in this area, and similar schemes for multi-media capability in the context of various
proposed 3G systems should be viewed with some care and even some skepticism. Perhaps a
simple feed through of data communication to a separate device, such as a laptop computer,
is all that is desired or needed. This would imply that the GSM approach is closer to the needs
of the end user than the present CDMA approach.
12.3 Inherent vs. Specific Implementation Aspects:

Certain distinctive characteristics of the two technologies are inherent and difficult to surmount
without great effort. One example of this is the sensitivity of CDMA to intermodulation (IM) from
narrow-band interference. Another example is the incompatibility of overlaid cell technology
with CDMA. Other characteristics are not inherent in the technology but are the result of design
choices which, while not changeable in the present generation of equipment, could in theory
be modified in future generations of equipment.
One example of this is the high hardware cost of soft handover in CDMA, including the high
operational cost for renting or buying additional T-1 links between base stations and central
switch. The future redesign effort for CDMA could in theory address these cost issues by
designing a system with no hardware for soft handover in the base and mobile stations. This
gsmcdma.doc
would still be applicable to frequency plans other than n=1 and for WLL or other fixed wireless
applications. It is also possible that a redesign could address the cost of extra processing
hardware which is present in CDMA base stations, but which is not needed in real installations.
Since only about 18 channels can be supported per cell in a n=1 frequency plan, and only
about 40 channels for other frequency plans, provisioning hardware to process 64 total
channels is excessive. It is possible that some of the hardware such as digital signal
processors could be omitted in order to match the capability of the base equipment to the
actual radio channel capacity. On the other hand, the clock rate of the digital signal processing
equipment must still be high enough to handle the 1.28 Mb/s chip rate. The high clock rate also
affects power consumption as well. So it is not clear what cost reductions could be produced
by design of a lower capacity base station. Design changes of this type, if feasible, would
improve the economic picture for such CDMA installations. In this connection, bear in mind,
that when a frequency plan other than n=1 is used, the capacity advantage of CDMA over un-
enhanced GSM (although it only exists when comparing to certain specific non-optimized
installations) is also is gone as well. However, for backward compatibility with many existing
installations this is not currently a feasible alternative, since IS-95 compatibility demands all
this extra hardware and capacity.
Few aspects of the IS-95 Rate 2 redesign have been made public. One aspect of Rate 2
redesign is to reduce the RF interference with hearing aids and broadcast radio and TV
receivers caused by CDMA mobile sets. Both CDMA and GSM sets cause some hearing aid
interference, but GSM "buzz" is simpler to remove by means of a simple frequency filter while
present CDMA "buzz" is wideband audio and difficult to filter out.
13 WLL Systems:
Various types of cellular and PCS technologies have been used for WLL applications from
time to time. The typical cost of traditional wired telephone installation (not including the
telephone switch, which is needed in either case) is about $400 capital cost per subscriber. In
contrast, most so-called "high tier" cellular and PCS systems such as CDMA and GSM have a
$1000 to $5000 capital cost per subscriber for the base radio related equipment.
This high capital cost prevents these technologies from competing directly with wired service
on a long term basis. Radio WLL systems are primarily useful in special situations where the
long installation time of traditional wire is a major political or public relations problem. Another
special case for WLL occurs where there is a topographic problem which prevents wire
installation, such as a canyon between the central switch location and the subscribers. A third
application for WLL is to temporarily provide telephone service in an emergency, when regular
wired service is disrupted by disasters. In many cases where topography is not the problem,
WLL equipment has been installed first to give subscribers immediate service, and then
traditional wire has been installed later and service switched over to the wire. This has been
done repeatedly in so-called “third world” nations, such as East Germany immediately after re-
unification.
Where permanent WLL service is desired, other technologies not mentioned in this report
have a much lower cost per subscriber, and also a very limited radio range as well. In the
summary charts below, CDMA and GSM are considered relative to each other, in the intended
application of temporarily providing WLL service until traditional wire service can be provided.
Neither one is economically recommended, in their presently available embodiments, as
gsmcdma.doc
permanent WLL service vehicles. In fact, at the present time, the least costly WLL system on
20
the market is a TDMA system .
14 Costs
14.1 Higher Cost of Extra CDMA Processing and Link Hardware:

To handle temporary traffic overloads and also to handle soft handover, a CDMA system is
designed to also have two other properties which each have both benefits and undesirable
collateral effects. First, the base station is equipped with much extra processing capacity (more
hardware using faster computer clock rates) and many more communication links (sometimes
as much as 80% extra) between the base station(s) and the central switch. However, these
resources come at a high price, which is judged by many in the industry to be disproportionate
to the performance gained. This high cost is primarily related to soft handover, and only
secondarily related to more signal processing capacity than is actually useable. Unpublished
statements by various operators in the industry indicate that the cost of GSM base equipment
is typically 30% to 60% more costly, per subscriber, than GSM or other technologies, even
when fully loaded with paying traffic.
14.2 Indirect Inferences Regarding Total Costs

The total capital and operational costs of CDMA (per end user) have not proven to be lower
than GSM or other TDMA systems. This can also be inferred both directly and indirectly from
several secondary sources. One source is the training and provisioning documents for existing
systems, and the bulletin costs of hardware. This source is not unambiguous, because most
vendors make special price concessions to system operators based on gross purchasing
volume, delivery adjustments, and whether the equipment is part of the initial installation
(usually at a lower unit price) or part of later added equipment (usually at a higher unit price).
One may also infer from the number of engineers and technicians employed by CDMA
operators that the salaries and equipment costs for ongoing system engineering is usually
higher for CDMA than for GSM or other TDMA systems of similar size. In addition, at the
consumer pricing level, the price of CDMA service has, until recent pricing shakeups in the
cellular and PCS business, been the highest in most markets. Consumers Reports magazine,
a well-known neutral consumer watchdog publication, evaluated the cost of cellular service in
the 15 largest US cities in the summer of 1998. Using an average user’s activity profile,
Consumers Reports magazine compared the most economical pricing package for all the
service providers in each city. The results indicated that CDMA service had the highest price in
all but two of these cities. Most prices were in the range of $50 per month for 80 minutes of
mostly local air time (thus about 62 cents per minute). Most other features and capabilities,
including roaming, short message service, etc., were priced extra with usage sensitive pricing.
Contemporaneous with the publication of that report, high volume customer cellular/PCS
industry pricing in the US was been strongly affected by the new Digital One Rate service of
AT&T Wireless, introduced in June, 1998. This plan is only sold to customers who reside in an
area served by AT&T Wireless where IS-136 base equipment is already installed. This pricing
plan provides so-called “bucket” pricing at three levels: 600 minutes per month for $89.99,
1000 minutes per month for $119.99, or 1400 minutes per month for $149.99. When fully
20
The Nortel-Ionica system is the current lowest price WLL system, although this status could change at any time.
gsmcdma.doc
utilized, these give the consumer a price ranging from approximately 14 to 11 cents per
minute. AT&T Wireless provides service via North American TDMA (IS-136 on both the 800
MHz and 1900 MHz bands) where available, with backup service using 800 MHz band AMPS
analog cellular in areas where IS-136 base equipment is not installed. The preferred dual-band
dual-mode IS-136 handset for this service is the Nokia model 6160. This service provides the
most widespread geographical coverage of any bucket pricing plan in North America. Service
is also provided in Canada and Mexico, although at higher prices (60 cents per minute21).
These price choices all include long distance and roaming, short message service, voice mail,
e-mail messages, caller ID, which are services otherwise offered for extra cost or usage-
sensitive pricing under other pricing plans by AT&T Wireless and various other cellular/PCS
service providers.
This bucket pricing has been very successful for AT&T Wireless, bringing in a very large
number of high volume customers, many taken away from the CDMA competitors. In August
1998 both 1900 MHz CDMA operators, PCS Primeco and Sprint, responded by offering similar
“bucket” pricing at 10 cents per minute, beginning at a $50 per month pricing level. The CDMA
price offerings also include extra services such as long distance, roaming, SMS, voice mail,
etc. This competitive price offering from the CDMA operators has only partially stemmed the
loss of high volume customers from the CDMA providers to AT&T, but it is only attractive to
those customers who confine their travel to the much more limited CDMA service areas of
these two operators. Incidentally, Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems, another IS-136 service
provider, has also recently announced a similar bucket pricing plan at 10 cents per minute with
nationwide coverage.
More central to the comparisons in this report, Omnipoint, a PCS-1900 service provider in New
York, Florida, and part of southern New England, announced their bucket pricing plan in New
York in September and modified it in December. They offer 6 price levels, with the long
distance component optional. Like other offerings, SMS and other traditionally “vertical”
services are included. Their usage cost thus ranges from 63 to an industry low of 9.6 cents per
minute, depending upon total monthly usage. Omnipoint has a much smaller total service area,
mostly on the east coast.
Obviously, direct comparison of these different pricing plans is complicated by the fact that
only AT&T has virtually complete North American coverage. Sprint and PCS Primeco and
Omnipoint each have limited coverage areas in a few large cities. One of the ironies of the
intentional non-interworking of CDMA handsets sold by Sprint and Primeco is that these two
carriers cannot back each other up in those areas where only one of them operates, thus
preventing them from offering a slightly larger coverage area. Perhaps they feel that they must
offer a lower price than AT&T Wireless due to this disparity in national service coverage.
Meanwhile, the complicated mix of local service pricing plans mentioned earlier, which were in
effect before the introduction of bucket pricing, are still very much in use by customers who
have small call volume or who do not travel outside their home service area. With regard to
these prior pricing plans, the findings of Consumer Reports magazine is still true: CDMA is the
most expensive service in most cities.
21
AT&T Wireless introduced an optional pricing modification for subscribers with heavy traffic to or from Canada in
December, 1998. For a fixed supplement of $19.99 per month, a subscriber can make all or part of their calls under
any one of the three aforementioned pricing plans to or from Canada, in addition to the USA.
gsmcdma.doc
This history of pricing competition must be interpreted with care, because there are obviously
many other factors which determine price, aside from the access technology used by the
system. One confounding factor is clearly the higher capital cost paid by CDMA operators for
their 1900 MHz band PCS licenses. The licenses for the 800 MHz band were issued in the
1980s before the FCC commenced auction sales of licenses, and were substantially “free” to
licensees such as AT&T wireless. Although AT&T Wireless does use IS-136 on the 1900 MHz
band in a few cities, this is a very minor factor in their capital costs. In most cities or areas
where AT&T Wireless does not own the “A” band 800 MHz cellular license, they provide
roaming service via billing agreements with the local “A” band 800 MHz licensee. There are a
very few (mostly rural) areas where the local licensee (who in such cases often has only
analog base stations) charges higher roaming fees than AT&T’s retail price! It is widely
acknowledged that AT&T Wireless is actually losing money for such roaming service in these
few areas. However, this is definitely an exceptional case.
It is true that the two CDMA providers have the added burden of the high FCC license auction
fee in their capital cost structure. However, one of the claims made in the early 1990s for
CDMA was that its system cost per customer would be so much lower than other technologies
that this would compensate for the license costs on the 1900 MHz band. This claim has not
been heard in many years, and in fact it is certainly not true because the capital cost of CDMA
base equipment is significantly higher, per subscriber, than other technologies.
Another complicating factor in interpreting the inferred costs behind bucket pricing is that all
such plans include nationwide long distance calling in the base rate. Omnipoint does not have
a business affiliation with a nationwide long distance carrier, yet Omnipoint offers a lower
bucket price at the highest usage level than any other bucket pricing plan! Clearly AT&T
Wireless was able to exploit its position as a long distance network provider by folding long
distance costs, which are under its own control, into the total pricing package. However, Sprint
is also a nationwide long distance network provider, and PCS Primeco is owned by a
consortium of telephone operating companies which have access to long distance rates which
are as low as any other in the industry. The Bell Atlantic (again an IS-136 technology provider)
bucket price offering also includes nationwide long distance calling at the same 10 cent per
minute price equal to the CDMA providers, and they are not a long distance provider.
One significant factor to note from the emergence of bucket pricing is that it was started by a
carrier who uses TDMA technology, and that CDMA operators only responded to this change
in pricing, albeit with a slightly lower price per minute. Industry observers are now watching for
a further significant change in marketing. In the past, cellular and PCS services were offered
from a complicated menu of local pricing plans with many usage-sensitive options, free air time
at different off-peak days and hours, etc. Some industry observers stated sarcastically that one
objective of this varied menu was to prevent direct pricing comparisons for equivalent service
mixes. The marketeers stressed such intangibles as voice quality, large radio area coverage,
and reliability and reputation of the service provider. Price was not the selling point.
Bucket pricing is leading to highly price-competitive marketing of directly equivalent commodity
services. Local service offerings (no roaming) of the bucket pricing type, such as 300 minutes
for $24.95 (corresponding to 8.3 cents per minute) with all the optional features included,
appear daily in local advertising by cellular and PCS carriers in many cities. If the industry
races into a true price competitive market with all features included, what will be the
importance of low cost radio access technology to the operating companies?
Some industry observers have recently stated that differences in technology costs were not
the determining factor of total costs for many system operators in the past, because retail
gsmcdma.doc
cellular/PCS service prices included large amounts for sales promotions and customer support.
Sales and billing costs still are extremely high in the cellular/PCS industry compared to wired
telephone or other utilities. These observers have predicted that strong price competition in the
future may lead to extensive cost cutting in the cellular/PCS industry. The high sales
commissions and purchase subsidies of yesterday will be severely cut back, and lower cost
direct marketing (order taking) will be used most extensively. Customers will be sold radio
handsets without subsidy. The number of service and billing options offered will be drastically
reduced, and standard packages of features will all be included. In this predicted “bare bones”
operation, the cost of operations, administration, maintenance and provisioning of the base
technology system will become a much more significant part of the remaining total operating
costs. This is where the cost differences between CDMA and TDMA will be most important. It
will then be extremely interesting to observe which access technology can retain profitability if
their competitive retail sales price continues to drop. Will the CDMA operators initiate the next
round of price competition, or will they be seriously injured by it?
15 Review of Conclusions:
In the opinion of the present author, CDMA is not the primary technological (capacity related)
nor the primary economic choice for cellular and PCS. The claims for higher system capacity in
CDMA have not been proven in the field. The same factors which make CDMA more
expensive for mobile systems also affect fixed WLL use. Although a redesign of existing
CDMA equipment to eliminate soft handover could greatly reduce the costs, this is unlikely in
the near term due to requirements in the mobile cellular/PCS market for backward compatibility
with existing IS-95 product already in the field. It is more realistic to anticipate a "stripped
down" CDMA WLL design in the more distant future, but even then, comparison of existing
WLL systems of both the CDMA and TDMA technologies show equal quality of speech and
data but do not show a cost advantage for CDMA.
In the opinion of the present author, the numerous alternative technologies proposed for 3G
systems, and their associated legal and business uncertainties, should not be significant in
decisions regarding radio system technology at this time. Eventual de facto convergence on
one of the existing technologies (with slight modifications and improvements) appears to be a
more likely scenario than the introduction of a totally new 3G technology worldwide. GSM
technology appears to be a good candidate for this role, based on the fact that it has
performance and data communication capabilities equal to or better than other technologies,
existing world wide installations (although admittedly rather thinly dispersed in North and South
America) and better capacity and cost figures than other technologies as well.
The major points of discussion are summarized in Table 3.
Table 3: Major Comparisons of GSM vs. CDMA
GSM CDMA
Application Advantage Disadvantage Advantage Disadvantage
Coverage Coverage is none Technologically Coverage is slightly
equal to or coverage is equal inferior in cells with
better than other to other severe fading due
gsmcdma.doc
technologies. technologies in to outer boundary

cells of average to power limitations.
little fading.
Capacity Enhance GSM none Capacity is high, Capacity is not
(with IUO and but less than superior,
IFH) has better enhanced GSM. particularly for
capacity than continuous data
CDMA. transmission.
Quality Currently has GSM Half rate Second best digital No significant
best speech speech coder is speec coder on the disadvantages
coder quality on barely market.
the market. adequate. Use
only when
capacity is a
severe need.
Features Most complete Less features. Presently third
set of defined Developers are place in North
and available concentrating on American market
features (data complex vertical with vertical
communication, feature package features
etc.) with Microsoft.
Data Most advanced Hoping to leap Presently third
Capabilities and comp- ahead with a place in North
rehensive set of software package American market
data and fax from Microsoft. with data and fax
protocols. Likely support. Microsoft
to maintain a deal discourages
lead for about 5 participation by
years. independent
software suppliers.
Operations, Simplest Most costly,
Administra- planning, complex to plan,
tion and installation, and install, maintain RF
Maintenance maintenance. coverage.
Use in Minimum single Present equipment
microcells or carrier frequency configurations not
low capacity installation is economically
(e.g., economically favorable for small
highway feasible. traffic cells.
corrodors)
cells.
Fundamental No fundamental IM sensitivity can IM sensitivity of
Technical technical be evaded in some wide band low level
Problems problems bands where no receiver is a
known. strong interference problem in some
bands. No
gsmcdma.doc
is present. fundamental fix yet

available. Not
useable with IUO.
Applicability Lowest cost Not low enough More costly for
for WLL choice. cost for WLL than other
permanent technologies. Not
competition low enough cost for
with wired permanent
telephone. competition with
wired telephone.
Cost Lowest cost per Most expensive
customer, partly equipment cost per
due to high customer. Future
capacity, partly design
to competitive improvements and
vendor elimination of soft
marketplace. handover could
reduce cost, but not
obvious that
reduction would be
competitive to
GSM.
gsmcdma.doc
Appendix 1: Frequency Dependence of Fading

When a radio antenna is located in a multi path radio propagation zone, fading may occur at
this location over a range of frequency dependent on the multipath signal characteristics. The
distribution of such fading frequencies in the radio spectrum is dependent on the particular
delay and amplitude of each component ray of various multi path radio rays in the vicinity of
this antenna. The geometry and geography of each particular cell’s various radio reflective
surfaces often produce significantly different spectral fading patterns in each part of the same
cell. While there are many places in the cell area which experience fading at this particular
frequency, there are also other locations where there is a strong signal instead of a fade. This
happens because the various multi path rays are in phase at these other locations, and they
combine there to produce a strong composite radio signal instead of a fade.
When there is a range of different delay times for the various rays, the fading occurs within a
spectral range of frequencies called the coherence bandwidth. The coherence bandwidth of a
fade is approximately equal to the reciprocal of the delay spread. The depth of the fade (in dB)
is greatest near the center of the coherence bandwidth and gradually decreases towards the
edges of the coherence bandwidth. We state this fact without further mathematical proof. For
frequencies outside of the coherence bandwidth, the various delayed radio rays are no longer
close enough to the particular phase angles which have combined at the central fade
frequency, and consequently they no longer cancel each other out. In the case where the
delay spread is very large (and thus the coherence fading bandwidth is small), using a radio
signal whose bandwidth is significantly greater than the bandwidth occupied by the fade will
minimize the impact of fading on the power level of the signal. Only a fraction of the radio
spectral power is affected by the relatively narrow band fade. However, even when the fade
occurs over only a small part of the bandwidth of the signal, it may still produce a deleterious
effect on the radio waveform, which then causes serious bit errors. In the case where the delay
spread is very small (and thus the coherence fading bandwidth is very large), use of a wide
band radio signal does not improve the performance, because the wide range of fading
frequencies affects all the spectral components of the signal. Frequency hopping is often a
better and more practical way to deliver a radio signal in a bad multipath zone than designing a
technology with a wider signal bandwidth.
The delay (time) spread is measured in the following way. In a multi path radio environment,
we generate a pulse (or, for experimental convenience, a step waveform) modulated radio
carrier waveform at the transmit location (such as the base transmitter). We then measure the
time delay for each multi path replica of the radio signal when it arrives at the receiver. Pulses
arrive with different amplitudes and delays, and a typical graphical representation of the power
level of several such delayed pulses is illustrated in Fig. A.1 (a).
The time scale in Figure A.1(a) does not include the initial time delay for a wave to travel
between the transmitter and the location of the receiver, so the zero on this time scale does
not represent the time the wave emerged from the transmit antenna. There is more than one
choice in the literature for a parameter to represent the amount of time delay spread. The
mathematical standard deviation about the average (mean) delay time is frequently used as a
measure of delay spread, and this method is illustrated in Figure A.1. The received signal at
this location will have a rather deep fade at a particular frequency corresponding to the partial
cancellation of several of the delayed waves. Although the power level of each wave is shown
positive in Fig A.1.a, some of these waves have inverted amplitude polarity, which is
equivalent to a 180 degree phase shift. Inverted polarity occurs each time an electromagnetic
gsmcdma.doc
22
wave is reflected from a conductive or dielectric (insulating) reflecting surface . Therefore, any
ray which has experienced an odd number of reflections is inverted in polarity.
As an example, the delay spread illustrated in Figure A.1.a is approximately 5 microseconds.
This is typical of a relatively large cell in an urban environment, where delay spreads of as
much as 16 microseconds have been occasionally observed. The corresponding fade
coherence bandwidth, shown in Fig. A.1.b, is 1/5 of a megahertz, or 200 kHz. A large delay
spread indicates a fade which occurs within only a narrow coherence bandwidth within the
spectrum, since the use of other frequencies away from the center of the coherence bandwidth
will not produce the precise combination of ray amplitudes and polarities which cause the fade.
Conversely, when there is very little delay spread, the coherence bandwidth is very wide.
Consider the example with just two rays of equal amplitude but with one ray delayed by a half
cycle, or 180 degree phase difference, at the antenna location. At exactly 850 MHz, a 180
degree phase difference between two carrier waves can be produced by a delay of only 0.59
nanoseconds (0.00059 microseconds), which is half of the period of one cycle of an 850 MHz
carrier frequency oscillation. This hypothetical case has a very small delay spread, indeed, and
therefore it has a very large coherence bandwidth which is more than 1600 MHz. The fade
thus can be observed at a single location over a range of frequencies almost from zero
frequency to about double the 850 MHz carrier frequency of interest. Such a small delay
spread with two rays does not occur frequently in a cluttered urban area with many small
buildings, but it can occur in an environment with a single large nearby reflecting surface, like a
building or the side of a cliff. In such cases, the fade at that location occurs over such a wide
range of frequencies that we cannot prevent the fade by designing a different radio technology
with a practical wider bandwidth. The use of error protection codes, frequency hopping and the
like are better for delivering a good signal.
Frequency hopping can be used to correct a fade like the previous example, because fades do
not occur everywhere simultaneously. When a fade occurs on a particular carrier frequency at
a particular location, we can get a stronger signal by making two types of changes. First, we
can move the antenna (typically about 1 /4, 3 /4, 5/4, or some other odd number of quarter
wavelengths at that frequency) away from the location of the fade. Second, we can leave the
antenna in the same location, but change to a different carrier frequency, which will produce
fades and also regions of higher received power at different locations in the cell. This second
method is one of the reasons for preferring frequency hopping to the use of a single wideband
signal in many applications. Frequency hopping combined with bit interleaving will generally
produce a good overall received signal even when the antenna is stationary or moving very
slowly. This is important for the case of a hand held mobile set which moves only at pedestrian
speed or less.
When the GSM system operator uses optional frequency hopping, the mobile and base
stations change the frequency of the channel used for their conversation in a pre-determined
manner. The frequency hopping pattern typically goes through all of the different carrier
frequencies used in that cell, in a cyclic repeating pattern. There can be 20 or more such
carrier frequencies in a high traffic cell. Even if there is a fade on one of these frequencies in
one location that is so severe that 50% of the received digital bits are incorrect23, the result is
22
Only a wave which has reflected from a surface with high magnetic permeability would be non-inverted in electric
field polarity. This is a very rare circumstance in a natural environment.
23
A 50% BER is the worst possible value. The hypothetical case of 100% BER implies that all error can be fully
corrected by merely replacing all binary 1s with binary zeros, and vice versa!
gsmcdma.doc
approximately a 2.5% BER, which is at the upper end of the usable range. But GSM error
protection coding can often support an acceptable voice conversation at this error level. The
reader should understand that some cells have a smaller quantity of carrier frequencies, or
have a different spectral pattern of fading, and therefore such a result cannot be guaranteed in
all circumstances.
In contrast, use of a wideband signal like CDMA in a comparable wideband fade at a fixed
location, would have at least part of its radio frequency spectrum wiped out. Depending upon
the bandwidth of the fade and the relationships of the faded frequencies at that location to the
frequency components of the CDMA signal, there could be a severe increase in BER, beyond
the level of the designed-in error protection coding. Again, this effect is very site dependent,
and this description does not imply that the performance of CDMA is never satisfactory in the
presence of fading with a wide coherence bandwidth. An important factor in this comparison is
that this type of wideband CDMA fade may produce a very long string of consecutive bit errors
while the corresponding coherence bandwidth might not produce this undesired result with
frequency hopping GSM.
Radio Signal Power Received Spectral Radio Power

Delay time spread
Coherence bandwidth
0 5 10 840 841
Time (microseconds) Frequency (MHz)
a b
Figure A.1: Relationship Between Delay Spread and Fade Coherence Bandwidth
gsmcdma.doc

Comparison of Major Properties of GSM/PCS-1900 With CDMA

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GSM-CDMA Comparisons (Nokia Proprietary Information 1999 January 22) page 1 of 64

Comparison of Major Properties of

Notice: This document contains several trademarked product names,

10.5 So-called "Graceful Degradation" and "Breathing Cells": ...........................................45

Glossary of Terms and Symbols

PCS Personal Communication System(s)

Among existing available technologies discussed here, GSM/PCS-1900 technology is

3 Brief Description of GSM TDMA and IS-95 CDMA Technology:

3.2 CDMA (IS-95):

Figure 1: Simplified CDMA Coder

Receiver has A different channel

Figure 2: Simplified CDMA decoder

Table 1 Walsh Code Example

Figure 3: CDMA Waveforms

4 Historical Notes Regarding CDMA:

4.1 Significance (if any) of “Third Generation” (3G)

4.2 Critique of CDMA and IS-95:

5 Unsubstantiated GSM Claims:

5.1 Supportable GSM Claims:

6 Relevant Measures of Capacity and Cost:

Figure 4: Profitability Comparison of Hypothetical Large and Small Expense Steps

7.1 Technological Factors Affecting System Capacity:

Figure 5: Ideal Cell Cluster Illustrations

Figure 6: Relationship Between Detector S/N and Radio Channel C/(I+n)

7.2 Methods to Further Increase GSM Capacity

7.2.1 Discontinuous Transmit with Frequency Hopping

7.2.2 Underlay/ Overlay

Figure 8: Example of Overlaid Cells

7.3 CDMA Capacity:

7.4 Tabulated Capacity Estimates:

Table 2: Theoretical and Real System Capacity Comparisons

System Configuration Geo-Spectral Capacity

8.1 CDMA Coverage:

9.1 Data Protocol Support:

9.2 CDMA Data Capacity

9.3 No CDMA Capacity Advantage for Data Users:

9.4 GSM Data Capacity: Roadmap to higher data rates

10.1 GSM Frequency Hopping and IFH

10.2 CDMA Speech Quality:

10.3 CDMA Sensitivity to Intermodulation (IM):

10.4 CDMA C/(I+n) and Spreading Gain:

-10 C CDMA, 100%

Figure 9: CDMA C/(I+n) for Various Degrees of Interference Correlation

10.5 So-called "Graceful Degradation" and "Breathing Cells":

Region where high Region where call

(a) Cells configured with large (b) Cells configured with no

Figure 10: Cells configured to permit “Breathing,” or conversely, Higher Capacity

10.6 CDMA Sensitivity to Multipath Delay Spread:

11 CDMA Soft Handover:

11.1 Penalties of Soft Handover:

12 Implementation & Hardware

12.1 CDMA Technical and Engineering Effort:

12.2 Data Communication and Related Features

12.3 Inherent vs. Specific Implementation Aspects:

14.1 Higher Cost of Extra CDMA Processing and Link Hardware:

14.2 Indirect Inferences Regarding Total Costs

Table 3: Major Comparisons of GSM vs. CDMA

technologies. technologies in to outer boundary

is present. fundamental fix yet

Appendix 1: Frequency Dependence of Fading

Radio Signal Power Received Spectral Radio Power

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