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Reviews of 'The GSM System for Mobile communications' |
Mobiles, March 1993
The GSM specification is a daunting work for those who wish to understand the intricacies
of the most comprehensive intelligent network for mobile communications in the world.
Some 5,200 pages long the specification and associated documents are complex and difficult
for even experts to understand. Various attempts have been made to summarise the salient
aspects of GSM and present them in a way that can be easily assimilated.
Now a reference work has appeared, The GSM System for Mobile communications .
Authored by Marie-Bernadette Pautet and Michel Mouly an independent consultant based in France
the 700 page book uses a combination of excellent graphics, photographs and text to unravel
some of the more difficult areas of the GSM specification. The style adopted in the text
varies between passages of rather dense prose and some rather light-hearted attempts to
poke fun at the acronym ridden GSM standard.
The book steps through the key elements of a GSM network with each chapter listing specific
references into the GSM specifications themselves.
For those who are interested the book costs 685 FF plus additional postage for airmail
delivery. Mobiles considers this a bargain the The GSM System for Mobile
communications an essential reference work for all those involved in GSM.
Mobiles is a private client newsletter analysing events in the field of mobile communications,
and is published monthly by TeleResources Pty Ltd, Australia
IEEE Personal Communications, 4/1995
The Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) has been a major success for the cellular
radio industry in recent years. Initially, it was designed to provide a Pan-European industrial
standard for a complete digital cellular radio system which encompasses both radio and fixed
network aspects. Following the initial network launches across Europe, the GSM standard is
being rapidly adopted by many countries worldwide. In order to provide sufficient details for
equipment vendors to build system infrastructures and handsets, 5000 pages of Technical
Specifications are published by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)
for GSM Phase One. Indeed, the drafting of the GSM Technical Specification has been a lengthy
process which has spanned many years, requiring numerous technical solutions and commercial
compromises among telecommunication experts. The Technical Specification is intended primarily
for defining the interfaces between network entities and requirements which ensure interoperability
of network and mobile equipment. For this reason, the specification text is designed to minimize
the risk of ambiguity rather than to ease understanding by lay-people and professionals alike.
Furthermore, the rationale behind the choice of the many technical solutions is not recorded
in the Technical Speicification and is only known among those who were directly involved in
the GSM technical committees.
With such a complex system being rapidly adopted by many operators, there is a great need for
the availability of understandable and readable material to help operators and manufacturers
who were not directly involved in the initial specification process to work with the system.
This book fulfils this purpose neatly by providing both basic explanations to the technology,
as well as technical insight into many of the specialist areas. The subject areas are rather
independently organized in the book so that each chapter is sufficiently self-contained. It
is also pleasing to see that the material is organized to be progressively more detailed, so
that readers with more interest can progress further into a chapter.
The book is organized into nine chapters with the first two chapters covering some general
aspects and the architecture of a GSM system. The remaining seven chapters are technically
aligned to the areas of transmission, the radio interface, signalling transfer, radio resource
management, mobility and security management, communication management and network management,
respectively.
Specifically, the first chapter gives the history of GSM and the fundamentals of a cellular
system. It also describes the key functionalities of the GSM system. The second chapter goes
one step further in providing a much detailed overview of the GSM sub-systems which includes
descriptions of the mobile station, the base station subsystem, teh network and switching
subsystem and the operation subsystem. In addition, the functional planes, interfaces and
protocols are also described.
In the "in-depth" technical sections which follow, transmissions for both speeech and data
service delivery are first discussed in Chapter 3. The pricniple of the full-rate speech codec
is also outlined in this chapter. Chapter 4 examines the radio interface in depth. The
intricacy of the multiple access scheme together with the interleaving, channel coding,
ciphering and modulation principles are explained in some details. The time organization
diagrams in Section 4.2.1 are particularly enlightening and the lively explanation of the
interleaving principle in Section 4.3.2.1 is most stimulating.
With Chapters 3 and 4 laying a good foundation for the transmission functions, Chapter 5
exemplifies the signalling transfer mechanisms which are necessary to coordinate the different
network entities within a complex network. All the different signalling systems involved in
the network are adequately highlighted. The following three chapters then focus on management
functions and procedures. Chapter 6 covers the radio resource management which included
handoff and call establishment. Chapter 7 describes mobility and security management aspects.
This includes the location updating procedures and the protocols for encryption. The graphical
treatment of the authentication mechanism in Section 7.2 is ideal for engineers who need to
understand the concept but not the mathematics behind it. Chapter 8 provides a discussion on
the management of call control, supplementary services, and short messages for both
mobile-originated and mobile-terminated calls.
The final chapter (Chapter 9) of the book is devoted to an important topic for operating a
GSM system: network management. As before, the chapter is divided into a discussion of the
management aspects as well as the architecture and protocols. The section (Section 9.4.1)
on cellular planning would be useful to network operators in gaining insight into the
complicated relationship between power control, discontinuous transmission, and frequency
hopping and their effect on spectral efficiency.
In the final part, the book contains a series of appendixes. The first appendix lists all the
GSM Phase 1 technical specifications as well as a brief description of each one of them. In
addition, there are two other major indexes: a subject index and a "message" index. The former
enables easy cross-reference of the subject areas, while the latter provides references between
the protocol messages to the description in the text. This is particularly useful for people
who need to understand the context of the protocol messages which scattered across a number
of Technical Specifications in the original standard.
The book is well written, accurate, and clearly understandable. The diagrams are all clearly
depicted and easily understood. This text will become a significant addition to the cellular
engineers' technical library and will be a much-used reference for some time. It can enlighten
the reader to the technology and provide both basic and in-depth understanding to capitalize
on the significant technological developments in modern digital cellular radio. Overall, it
is strongly recommended that this book be read by those seeking to gain basic understanding
of the principle of the GSM system. In addition, it would be extremely useful to practicing
engineers in the field of personal communications and the cellular industry. A word of caution
must, however, be voiced here. While the book is accurate with respect to the GSM Phase One
Technical Specification, ETSI has now completed the Phase Two edition of the Standard and is
now progressing with the Phase Two Plus edition. I am sure the authors will update the book
in due course. - Stanley Chia -
IEEE Personal Communications, the Magazine of Nomadic Communications and Computing,
is published bimonthly by the IEEE Communications Society
A Cellular Systems Consultant at British Telecommunications, 8/1995
I would like to congratulate you on this excellent publication which has been a source of
invaluable information as well as a working book over the last few years in my involvement
within the GSM industry.
NTZ, Mai 5/1993
Ein fundiertes Buch über das sehr komplexe Thema GSM-Mobilfunk haben die beiden französischen Autoren
Michel Mouly und Marie-Bernadette Pautet im Selbstverlag vorgelegt.
Es ist in einem "Europa-Englisch" geschrieben, wie die beiden britischen Lektoren in einem
Vorwort bemerken - es habe sich als Kommunikationssprache herausgebildet, wenn viele
Standardisierungsleute unterschiedlicher Muttersprache miteinander reden.
In neun Kapiteln wird eine Einführung und eine kommentierende Beschreibung der GSM-Standards
gegeben, womit ein umfassender Überblick über das Standardisierungswerk vorliegt.
Im einzelnen geht es um die Architektur, die Übertragungstechnik, die Funkschnittstelle,
die Signalisierung, das Frequenzmanagement, das Mobilitäts- und Sicherheitsverhalten,
das Kommunikationsmanagement im Netz und das Netzmanagement.
Ein Verzeichnis der GSM-Spezifikationen und GSM-spezifischen Abkürzungen sowie ein
Literaturverzeichnis runden dieses GSM-Grundlagenwerk ab.
ntz ist eine monatliche Deutsche Zeitschrift über Informationstechnik und Telematik für Experten,
von VDE Verlag, Berlin.
Read the French language reviews
Cell & Sys, 4 rue Elisée Reclus, F-91120 PALAISEAU, FRANCE / marie-bernadette.pautet "at" m4x.org