7.3.4.

PCM Systems / Signalling

In PCM systems, signalling and speech are sampled, coded and transmitted within the frame of PCM channels.
Thus, with PCM, a convenient way of transmission is possible. The signaling information and speech information
carried in the same time slot is referred as inslotsignalling. The signalling information carried in a separate time slot
is referred as outslotsignalling. The timeslot of the inslotsignalling is fixed at eight bits.Telephone channels are
combined by time division multiplexing to form an assmebly of 24 or 30 channels. This is known as primary
multiplex group. Two frame structures are widely used in practice. They are DS1 24 channel system and European
30 channel system. DS1 24 channel system is popular in North America and Japan. Originally, DS1 is called as T1
system.
The table 7.2 lists the digital TDM signals of North America and Japan. DS0 is a 64 kbps signal that makes up the
basis for the DS1.

Incoming analog signals were time division multiplexed and digitized for transmission.
Each individual TDM channel are assigned 8 bits per time slot. Each frame is made of 24 × 8
bits = 192 bits plus one additional bit added to each frame to identity the fame boundaries.
Thus each frame contains 193 bits. The frame interval is 125 sec. Hence the basic T1 line rate
is 1.544 Mbps. This line rate has been established as the fundamental standard for digital
transmission.
30 channel PCM system. It is based on 30 speech channels transmitted within a frame
of 32 time slots (0 to 31). The total bit rate is 32 × 8 × 8 kbits/sec = 2048 kbps. Channel 0 is used
for providing the framing signal and channel 16 is used for transmitting the signalling
information relating to speech channels 1 to 15 and 17 to 31. Fig. 7.6 shows the 30 channel
PCM system

The 8 bits of channel 16 are shared between the 30 channels by a process of multiframing. 16
successive appearances of channel 16 form a multiframe of 8 bit time slots. Frame 0 contains a
multiframe alignment signal. Frame 1 to 16 of Fig. 7.6 (b) contains four bits of signalling
infomation for each of 2 channels. This arrangement enables a much larger number of signals
to be exchanged.