ASSIGNMENT NO.

1
Gohar Mumtaz

Telecom Engg.

UET Taxila

E1 Carrier:
In digital telecommunications, where a single physical wire pair can be used to
carry many simultaneous voice conversations by time-division multiplexing,
worldwide standards have been created and deployed. The European Conference of
Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) originally standardized
the E-carrier system, which revised and improved the earlier American T-carrier
technology, and this has now been adopted by the International Telecommunication
Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T). This is now widely
used in almost all countries outside the USA, Canada, and Japan.

The E-carrier standards form part of the Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy (PDH)
where groups of E1 circuits may be bundled onto higher capacity E3 links between
telephone exchanges or countries. This allows a network operator to provide a
private end-to-end E1 circuit between customers in different countries that share
single high capacity links in between.

In practice, only E1 and E3 versions are used. Physically E1 is transmitted as 32

timeslots and E3 512 timeslots, but one is used for framing and sometimes one
allocated for signaling call setup and tear down. Unlike Internet data services, E-
carrier systems permanently allocate capacity for a voice call for its entire duration.
This ensures high call quality because the transmission arrives with the same short
delay (latency) and capacity at all times.

E1 circuits are very common in most telephone exchanges and are used to connect
to medium and large companies, to remote exchanges and in many cases between
exchanges. E3 lines are used between exchanges, operators and/or countries.

An E1 link operates over two separate sets of wires, usually coaxial cable. A
nominal 3 volt peak signal is encoded with pulses using a method avoiding long
periods without polarity changes. The line data rate is 2.048 Mbit/s (full duplex,
i.e. 2.048 Mbit/s downstream and 2.048 Mbit/s upstream) which is split into 32
timeslots, each being allocated 8 bits in turn. Thus each timeslot sends and receives
 ASSIGNMENT NO. 1
an 8-bit PCM sample, usually encoded according to A-law algorithm, 8000 times
per second (8 x 8000 x 32 = 2,048,000). This is ideal for voice telephone calls
where the voice is sampled at that data rate and reconstructed at the other end. The
timeslots are numbered from 0 to 31.

Unlike the earlier T-carrier systems developed in North America, all 8 bits of each
sample are available for each call. This allows the E1 systems to be used equally
well for circuit switched data calls, without risking the loss of any information.

While the original CEPT standard G.703 specifies several options for the physical
transmission, almost exclusively HDB3 format is used.

Time division multiplexing is used at local exchanges to combine a number of

incoming voice signals onto an outgoing trunk. Each incoming channel is allocated
a specific time slot on the outgoing trunk, and has full access to the transmission
line only during its particular time slot. Because the incoming signals are analogue,
they must first be digitized, because TDM can only handle digital signals. Because
PCM samples the incoming signals 8000 times per second, each sample occupies
1/8000 seconds (125 seconds). PCM is at the heart of the modern telephone
system, and consequently, nearly all time intervals used in the telephone system are
multiples of 125 seconds.

Because of a failure to agree on an international standard for digital transmission,

the systems used in Europe and North America are different. The North American
standard is based on a 24-channel PCM system, whereas the European system is
based on 30/32 channels. This system contains 30 speech channels, a
synchronization channel and a signaling channel, and the gross line bit rate of the
system is 2.048 Mbps (32 x 64 Kbps). The system can be adapted for common
channel signaling, providing 31 data channels and employing a single
synchronization channel. The following details refer to the European system.

The 30/32 channel system uses a frame and multi-frame structure, with each frame
consisting of 32 pulse channel time slots numbered 0-31. Slot 0 contains the Frame
Alignment Word (FAW) and Frame Service Word (FSW). Slots 1-15 and 17-31 are
used for digitized speech (channels 1-15 and 16-30 respectively). In each digitized
speech channel, the first bit is used to signify the polarity of the sample, and the
remaining bits represent the amplitude of the sample. The duration of each bit on a
 ASSIGNMENT NO. 1
PCM system is 488 nanoseconds (ns). Each time slot is therefore 3.904 seconds
(8 bits x 488 ns). Each frame therefore occupies 125 seconds (32 x 3.904
seconds).

In order for signaling information (dial pulses) for all 30 channels to be

transmitted, the multi-frame consists of 16 frames numbered 0-15. In frame 0, slot
16 contains the Multi-frame Alignment Word (MFAW) and Multi-frame Service
Word (MFSW). In frames 1-15, slot 16 contains signaling information for two
channels. The frame and multi-frame structure are shown below. The duration of
each multi-frame is 2 milliseconds (125 seconds x 16).

The frame and multi-frame structures for a 30/32 channel PCM system