2.

Past Applications of Multi-Carrier Communication

The history of mobile communication can be categorized into three periods (a) the pioneer era, (b) the pre-cellular era, and (c) the cellular era. The period of 1800 and early 1900 is comes under pioneer era. In this period the fundamental research in the field of wireless communication took place with regards to electromagnetic waves and the invention of the wireless telegraph by Guglielmo Marconi. On the basis of these fundamental researches in 1946, the first commercial mobile telephone system was set up by Bell Telephone Laboratories. This system used three channels at 150 MHz band. These channels were based on frequency modulation (FM), initially with a manually operated telephone exchange, and later an automatic exchange. Later on, many other wireless systems were also developed during this era, collectively called as Mobile radio telephone. Since these were the predecessors of the first generation of cellular telephones, these systems are sometimes retroactively referred to as Zero Generation (0G) systems. Few systems of 0G are Push to Talk (PTT) or manual, Mobile Telephone System (MTS) in 1946, Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS) in 1969, and Advanced Mobile Telephone System (AMTS). The primary users of this equipment were industrialists and the rich. These mobile telephones were usually mounted in cars or trucks. However, because of their large coverage area, these systems could not manage a large number of users. The cellular concept was basically developed to overcome this problem so that large number of users can accommodate with better bandwidth efficiency. 2.2 First Generation (1G) Mobile Standards

These are the analog cell phone standards that were designed in 1970s, deployed in early 1980s and continued until being replaced by 2G digital cell phones. First generation system provided only voice and other telephone services and used frequency division multiple access (FDMA) techniques for resources sharing. The worlds first commercial cellular system was implemented by the Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Company (NTT) in Japan. The system, deployed in 1979, uses 600 FM duplex channels in the 800 MHz band. Several other analog standards were also developed in 1980. The first generation systems were incompatible with one another because of the different frequencies and communication protocol used. This incompatibility between various systems of analog 1G standards precluded roaming; users had to change their mobile terminals when they moved to another country. Another problem of all 1G systems is the capacity; the limited number of users can be supported by these standards because of the use of FDMA. To overcome these problems of roaming and capacity, a new generation of Mobile standards was evolve during 1900 called as second generation of Mobile standards. 2.3 Second Generation (2G) Mobile Standards

The technologies which are using by most of the todays cellular networks come und er the 2G(Second Generation) cellular standards. Unlike 1G cellular system that relied exclusively on FDMA and analog FM, 2G standards use digital modulation formats with Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) techniques. The Global System for Mobile (GSM) is most successful and popular 2G standard based on TDMA technique and was first deployed in Germany in 1981. It supports eight time slotted users for each 200

KHz radio channel and has been deployed widely in Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and some parts of the US. There are three more Interim standards 136 (IS-136), Interim standard 95 (IS-95) and PDC (Pacific Digital Cellular), all three 2G standards are based on TDMA. 2.4 IS-136: It supports three time slotted users for each 30 KHz radio channel and is widely used in North America, South America, and Australia. IS-95: It is also known as CDMA One, which supports up to 64 users that are orthogonally coded and simultaneously transmitted on each 1.25 MHz channel. PDC: It is a Japanese TDMA standard that is similar to IS-136. Enhanced Second Generation (2.5G) Mobile Standards

The 2G technologies use circuit-switched data modems that limit data users to a single circuit switched voice channel. Due to this circuit switching, the data rates available with 2G networks are very low. All 2G networks can support single user data rates on the order of 10 Kbps. With this low data rate, 2G standards are able to support limited Internet browsing and sophisticated short messaging capabilities. Short Messaging Service (SMS) is a popular feature of GSM. In an effort to retrofit the 2G standards for compatibility with increased throughput data rates that are required to support modern Internet applications, new data-centric standards have been developed that can be overlaid upon existing 2G technologies. These new standards represent 2.5G technology which allow existing 2G equipment to be modified and supplemented with new base station add-ons and subscriber unit software upgrades to support higher data rate transmissions for Internet browsing, e-mail accessing, mobile commerce, and location based mobile services. The 2.5G technologies also support a popular new web browsing format language, called Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), which allows standard web pages to be viewed in a compressed format. The three popular 2.5G standards which are based on TDMA include: High Speed Circuit Switched Data (HSCSD) for 2.5G GSM General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) for 2.5G GSM and IS-136 Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE)

HSCSD is a circuit switched technique that allows a single mobile user to use consecutive user time slots in the GSM standard. HSCSD relaxes the error control coding algorithms of original GSM and increase the available application data rate to 14.4 Kbps, as compared to the original 9.6 Kbps in the GSM specification. GPRS is a packet based data network, which is well suited for non-real time Internet usage, (like email access) where the user downloads much more data than it uploads on the Internet. Unlike HSCSD, which dedicates circuit switched channels to specific users, GPRS supports multi-user network sharing of individual radio channels and time slots. Thus GPRS can support many more users than HSCSD. When all eight time slots of a GSM radio channel are dedicated to GPRS, an individual user is able to achieve as much as 171.2 Kbps. EDGE is a more advanced upgrade to the GSM standard which requires the addition of new hardware and software at existing base stations. EDGE introduces a new digital modulation format, 8-PSK, which is used in addition to GSMs standards GMSK modulation. EDGE allows for nine different air interface formats, known as multiple modulation and coding schemes, with varying degrees of error control protection. When EDGE uses 8-PSK modulation without any error protection, and all eight times slots

of a GSM radio channel are dedicated to a single user, a raw peak throughput data rate of 547.2 Kbps can be provided. 2.5 Third Generation (3G) Mobile Standards

The 3G mobile standards are the successor of 2G and enhance 2G (2.5G) mobile standards. Although, the 2G mobile standards can accommodate as much user with lot of data services and international roaming, but it still unable to provide high speed Internet and multimedia services on mobile. Interim solution in terms of 2.5G standards have been developed to provide such services with high data rate. However, all these solution were not able to provide services like high quality music, video, games, high speed web browsing, e-commerce, mobile banking, e-reservation etc on mobile with high data rate. This demand of high data rate mobile communication initiated research in 1995 with an outcome of new mobile standards called as Third Generation (3G) mobile standard. 3G technologies enable network operators to offer the users a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity through improved spectral efficiency.