Discontinuous Transmission (DTX)

Traffic signal transmission can be interrupted during speech pauses

Advantages: 1. Reduction of mobile station power consumption 2. Minimized interference on the air interface Problem: An abrupt interruption is disruptive to the listener because the background noise disappears during the speech pauses. Solution: Background noise or comfort noise is generated on the receiving end during transmission pauses. Parameters characterizing the background noise are transmitted every 480ms in TRAU speech frames. Idle speech frames are sent during interim periods. This process is known as discontinuous transmission.

When do we practically consider sub ?

When DTX used, and the receiver enters the DTX mode , then the measurement done over all the frames is not valid. With DTX, if there is completely no speech for 480ms, then still there will be 8 frames of SID and 4 frames of SACCH, these 12 subset frames will be used for sub measurements . DTX is not used on BCCH carrier (all timeslots) , hence if the call is on a TCH timeslot which is on a BCH carrier, then it will always be FULL, and in the measurement report both Sub and Full values will be same. DTX is not used on the SDCCH also , hence the above clause applies to this also. On a TCH carrier, when DTX was used by the BTS in the previous 480ms period, measurement is Sub, else it is full. If Frequency Hopping was used, and BCH carrier was a part of it, and downlink power control is used, then the Rxlev measurements will always be sub ( since BCH carrier frames are not included in the Rxlev measurement averaging), but RxQual will be full.