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Cellular Networks: An Evolution from 1G to 4G

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Cellular Networks: An Evolution from 1G to 4G
Indika A. M. Balapuwaduge and Frank Y. Li
Synonyms
Cellular and mobile communication net-
works.
Definitions
A cellular network is a wireless com-
munication network which provides ser-
vices to mobile users covered by a region
consisting of multiple cells. Frequency
reuse is a fundamental concept in cellu-
lar networks.
Historical Background
Prior to the invention of cellular
technologies, there were few mobile
telephone systems in the late 1940s in
the US and in the early 1950s in Europe,
such as car based telephone systems.
The push-to-talk technique was used in
these systems and communication was
performed over a single channel. With
a single channel and a single antenna
at each device, the transmission and
reception of signals were performed
in a half-duplex manner. Due to low
capacity, restricted mobility support
and poor service quality, those systems
were not efficient. Later on, Mobile
Telephone System (MTS) and Improved
MTS (IMTS) were introduced in order
to support a larger number of mobile
stations. IMTS adopted two channels
one for sending and one for receiving,
allowing mobile communication to work
in a full-duplex mode. However, the
concept of cells did not apply to these
pre-1G mobile communication systems.
The breakthrough for increasing ca-
pacity appeared in the 1970s when the
technique for frequency reuse was de-
veloped by dividing a coverage region
into multiple cells and reusing the same
frequency at different cells which suf-
ficiently far away from each other. In
1979, the first 1G cellular network was
launched in Japan. In 1981, the first in-
1
2 Authors Suppressed Due to Excessive Length
ternational cellular network, Nordic Mo-
bile Telephone (NMT) systems, came to
operation in Nordic countries. In 1983,
two other 1G systems, Advanced Mo-
bile Phone System (AMPS) and Total
Access Communication System (TACS)
were introduced in the US and other Eu-
ropean countries including the UK, Italy,
respectively.
Through a journey which started
about 40 years ago, cellular commu-
nications have experienced dramatic
changes and upgrades from 1G to 4G.
Those transitions include the system
change from analog to digital, the core
network evolution from circuit-switched
to packet-switched technologies and
its further transfer towards all Internet
Protocol (IP) networks.
First Generation Cellular
Systems
The 1G mobile systems were designed
for providing voice services only and
were developed based on analog tech-
nologies. For medium access of multiple
users, Frequency Division Multiple
Access (FDMA) schemes were adopted.
For carrying voice traffic, Frequency
Modulation (FM) was employed as the
modulation scheme.
Nordic Mobile Telephone Systems
NMT is a mobile telephone network
covering first the five Nordic countries,
Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden,
and Iceland and later quiet a few other
countries. NMT has two variants based Total Access Communication Systems
on the operational frequency bands,
known as NMT-450 and NMT-900 TACS was the first standard that used
respectively. NMT-450 was developed the 900 MHz band and was deployed
in order to establish a compatible
telephone system in the Nordic coun-
tries (Nordic Mobile Telephone Group
1995). Initially NMT-450 targeted at
deploying macro cells at the 450 MHz
band to provide larger cell coverage and
later it was modified to operate in the
900 MHz band by considering the size
and transmission power constraint of
handsets. NMT systems were initially
launched in Norway and Sweden as
a national service, and later on it was
enhanced with roaming services across
countries. NMT-900 bears more chan-
nels than the NMT-450 network, able to
serve a higher number of subscribers.
Advanced Mobile Phone System
The AMPS systems were deployed
in North America. It has 2x20 MHz
bandwidth within the 800-900 MHz fre-
quency band (825-845 MHz for uplink
and 870-890 MHz for downlink traffic
respectively) allocated by the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC).
With 30 kHz bandwidth for each chan-
nel, it provides 832 duplex channels.
This system employs 7-cell clusters
for frequency reuse and uses mainly
120◦ sector antennas. Three sectors for
a single AMPS cell site were designed
to achieve a carrier-to-interference
ratio of 18 dB with satisfactory voice
quality. In 1991, an improved version
of AMPS named as narrowband AMPS
(N-AMPS) was developed to further
increase AMPS capacity with additional
advanced features such as authentication
and caller ID.
Title Suppressed Due to Excessive Length
in other European countries (Goldsmith
2005). TACS was operated at a higher
frequency than AMPS and adopted nar-
rower bandwidth per channel (25 kHz in
TACS versus 30 kHz in AMPS). With
narrower bandwidth for each channel,
the total number of channels is increased
for a band with fixed bandwidth. Op-
erated at a higher frequency, the cover-
age for each cell will be reduced given
the same transmission power and chan-
nel condition. In other words, this sys-
tem was designed for having higher ca-
pacity rather than coverage by deploy-
ing a larger number of cells and allow-
ing lower transmission power for mobile
stations. Indeed, TACS was proved to be
efficient and economical for highly den-
sity urban areas. A variant of TACS, J-
TACS, was also adopted in Japan.
Second Generation Cellular
Systems
The core network of both 1G and 2G
cellular networks was built based on
circuit-switched technologies and the
service was mainly targeted at voice
traffic. However, unlike 1G systems,
2G employed all-digital transmission
technologies for both control signaling
and data traffic. The introduction of
digital communication provides a series
of important features such as the support
of advanced source and channel coding,
more efficient spectrum utilization, and
a high degree of resistance against inter-
ference and channel fading. In addition,
the handling of control information is
more efficient in digital systems.
2G cellular networks were deployed
worldwide. They are represented by
four major standards, i.e, Global System
for Mobile Communications (GSM),
3
Interim Standard (IS)-136 or Digital
AMPS (D-AMPS), IS-95 or cdmaOne,
and Personal Digital Cellular (PDC).
Except cdmaOne, the other three
systems are based on Time Division
Multiple Access (TDMA) mechanisms
for medium access. TDMA allows
multiple users share the same channel
in the frequency domain by allocating
a specific short period of time, known
as time slot, to each user for their
channel access. Among these four
standards, GSM is the most popular 2G
technology. Given the fact that 3G and
4G are already widely deployed in the
world as of 2017, GSM still occupies
approximately 39% of the global mobile
market share.
Global System for Mobile
Communications
In 1982, a committee called Groupe
Spécial Mobile was established in order
to design a Pan-European digital cellular
standard for mobile communications
which would replace the incompatible
1G analog systems. The European
Telecommunications Standards Institute
(ETSI) initiated the development of the
first version of GSM and the first GSM
call was made in 1991. The success of
GSM is represented by its over 90%
market share in the 2G world, covering
globally around 200 countries and
territories.
GSM is operated mainly in three
frequency bands, i.e., GSM-900, GSM-
1800, and GSM-1900 with 124, 374,
and 299 radio channels respectively. The
original GSM network was developed
for voice communication supporting a
variety of voice codecs. The bandwidth
for each GSM channel is 200 kHz and
there are 8 time slots in each frame
4 Authors Suppressed Due to Excessive Length
which lasts for 4.615 ms. The raw data
transmission rate achieved at each chan-
nel is 270.833 kbps and it is shared by 8
users. With the combination of TDMA
and FDMA, GSM provides the capabil-
ity of simultaneous conversations at the
same frequency through different time
slots. Other salient features of GSM
include data encryption, subscriber
identity module (SIM) card which gives
a unique identity to each mobile station,
and global roaming (Eberspächer et al
2009). Furthermore, GSM is enhanced
to provide short message service (SMS),
however, still based on circuit-switched
technologies.
GPRS and EDGE
To support higher data transmission
rates in GSM networks and provide IP
services without replacing the network
infrastructure, developments were made
to upgrade GSM networks into General
Packet Radio Service (GPRS) in year
2000. GPRS is also known as 2.5G
and there are two major enhancements
for the evolution from GSM to GPRS.
At the radio access network, a user
is allowed to occupy up to 5 time
slots so that 114 kbps and 20 kbps are
achieved for downlink and uplink traffic
respectively. At the core network, two
entities, Serving GPRS Support Node
(SGSN) and gateway GPRS Support
Node (GGSN) are introduced. With the
support of Packet Data Protocol (PDP)
and GPRS Tunneling Protocol (GTP),
end-to-end IP services can be provided.
In 2003, there was another im-
provement in GSM systems with the
deployment of Enhanced Data rates
for GSM Evolution (EDGE) networks.
EDGE is regarded as an extension
of the GPRS radio access network
through advanced modulation schemes.
It increased the data rates to 384 kbps
for downlink and 60 kbps for uplink
respectively.
Third Generation Cellular
Systems
While GSM was in its early stage, the
standardization of the next generation
mobile telecommunication network
was also initiated by ETSI aiming to
develop a new system called Universal
Mobile Telecommunications System
(UMTS). High spectrum efficiency, data
rates up to 2 Mbps, variable bit rates,
QoS requirements based on service
types, support of asymmetric uplink and
downlink traffic and co-existence with
2G systems are the main requirements
for 3G systems (Holm and Toskala
2007). Meanwhile ITU commenced
proposing recommendations for 3G
systems known as International Mobile
Telecommunications 2000 (IMT-2000)
and started to investigate suitable
spectrum for 3G. The establishment of
the 3rd Generation Partnership Project
(3GPP) in 1998 became a milestone
for the standardization of cellular net-
works as a global standard from 3G
and beyond. In Tab. 1, we summarize
3GPP releases and their main features.
Note that current 4G and upcoming
5G standards are also standardized by
3GPP.
The key mechanism used for medium
access in 3G is CDMA which allows
multiple mobile stations transmit at the
same time and in the same frequency
band. In a CDMA cell, each subscriber
is assigned a unique code and the codes
assigned to different stations are orthog-
onal to each other. As such, the number
Title Suppressed Due to Excessive Length 5

Table 1 3GPP release dates and features

3GPP Release Start/Release Date Summary of Key Features

R99 1996/2000 First release of the UMTS standard

R4 1998/2001 This release added features including an all-IP core network. It
was originally referred to as Release 2000
R5 2000/2002 IP Multimedia Subsystem and High Speed Downlink Packet
Access (HSDPA)
R6 2000/2004 Integrate the operation of UMTS with wireless LAN networks
and added enhancements to IMS (including Push to talk over
Cellular), and it added High Speed Uplink Packet Access
(HSUPA).
R7 2003/2007 Detailed improvements to QoS for applications such as VoIP
and upgrades for High Speed Packet Access Evolution,
HSPA+, as well as changes for EDGE Evolution.
R8 2006/2008 Provide details for the LTE System Architecture Evolution,
SAE, an all-IP flat network architecture providing the capac-
ity and low latency required for Long Term Evolution (LTE)
and future evolutions.
R9 2008/2009 Further enhancements to the SAE as well as allowing for
WiMax and LTE/UMTS interoperability.
R10 2009/2011 Up to 3 Gbps downlink and 1.5 Gbps uplink, carrier aggre-
gation (CA), relay nodes to support Heterogeneous Networks,
higher order MIMO antenna configurations.
R11 2010/2012 Enhancements to Carrier Aggregation, MIMO, relay nodes, co-
ordinated multipoint transmission and reception to enable si-
multaneous communication with multiple cells, introduction of
new frequency bands.
R12 2011/2015 Enhanced small cells for LTE, inter-site carrier aggregation, in-
terworking between LTE and WiFi or HSDPA.
R13 2012/2016 LTE-U, LTE for machine-type communication (MTC), full-
dimension MIMO, LTE-Advanced Pro.
R14 2015/2017 Energy efficiency, location services, mission critical data and
video, massive IoT.
R15 2016/2018 5G Phase 1 (new radio).
R16 2017/2019-2020 5G Phase 2.
6 Authors Suppressed Due to Excessive Length

of simultaneous calls in a CDMA cell ments by 3GPP, i.e., HSDPA in R5

is soft limited (based on the interference and HSUPA in R6. The main idea of
level), not hard limited as in GSM. HSDPA is to increase downlink data rate
through techniques including Adaptive
Modulation and Coding (AMC), Hybrid
UMTS WCDMA Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ),
and fast packet scheduling. Unlike in
Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) was the the previous standards, the Medium
air interface for the UMTS standard Access Control (MAC) layer of HSDPA
originally proposed by ETSI in 1998. To systems is installed at the base station,
provide peak data rates from 384 kbps i.e., NodeB. Thus retransmissions
to 2.048 Mbps, the WCDMA system can be controlled directly by NodeB,
operates on wider channels each with leading to faster retransmission and ac-
5 MHz bandwidth. However, the core cordingly shorter delay with packet data
network architecture of UMTS remains operation (Holm and Toskala 2007).
the same as the existing GSM/GPRS HSDPA is capable of supporting up to
networks. 14.4 Mbps peak theoretical throughput.
WCDMA is a Direct Sequence Similarly HSUPA is developed to sup-
Spread Spectrum (DSSS) system which port enhanced packet data throughput
initially operates in the 1885-2025 MHz for uplink. HSUPA enables additional
and 2110-2200 MHz frequency bands features such as fast power control and
for uplink and downlink respectively. variable spreading factors which are
It supports operation modes of both disabled in HSDPA. However, HSUPA
Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) does not support AMC. It is capable
when symmetric uplink/downlink chan- of providing up to 5 Mbps peak uplink
nels are available and Time Division throughput.
Duplex (TDD) when only asymmetric
spectrum is available. In addition to
achieving higher data rate, the support
for multi-code operation, larger number Fourth Generation Cellular
of spreading factors, and enhanced Systems
transmission diversity are the key fac-
tors which lead WCDMA to the most The data rate provided by 3G networks
popular 3G technology. Moreover, for was not able to meet the growing
the purpose of leveraging the GSM demand for Internet access via mobile
coverage for WCDMA, seamless han- phones. From 2008, ITU’s Radiocom-
dovers between GSM and WCDMA are munications Sector (ITU-R) initiated
also supported as well as dual-mode the process for developing a new system
handsets. known as IMT-Advanced. The main
requirements for this new system in-
clude supporting 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps
High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) peak data rate for high and low mobil-
ity scenarios respectively, bandwidth
HSPA includes two phases as the scalability up to 100 MHz, mobility
beyond UMTS WCDMA enhance- support with up to 350 km/h, 10 ms user
Title Suppressed Due to Excessive Length
plane latency and 100 ms control plane
latency, worldwide roaming capability,
inter-networking with other 2G and
3G systems, and improved spectral
efficiency (Korhonen 2014). Radio
technologies that could meet these
requirements are termed as 4G systems.
LTE-advanced (LTE-A) developed by
3GPP is regarded as the de facto 4G
mobile communications system from a
global perspective. Although LTE does
not meet the requirements for 4G as
specified by ITU, it is often marketed as
a 4G technology.
LTE
LTE is presented here under the 4G um-
brella considering the fact that both LTE
and, the True 4G technology, LTE-A,
are based on Orthogonal Frequency-
Division Multiplexing (OFDM)/OFDM
Access (OFDMA) mechanisms for
medium access. LTE supports both
FDD and TDD operations and provides
flexible operations in both symmetric
and asymmetric spectrum. To enhance
uplink power efficiency, LTE adopts
Single Carrier Frequency Division Mul-
tiple Access (SC-FDMA). To achieve
higher data rate, LTE offers flexible
bandwidth allocation up to 20 MHz.
Moreover, much shorter frame sizes (10
ms frames and 1 ms sub-frames) are
introduced. With a configuration of 20
MHz spectrum and 4x4 MIMO, 326
Mbps on the downlink and 86 Mbps on
the uplink can be achieved in LTE radio
networks.
To upgrade LTE core networks,
3GPP R8 introduced Evolved Packet
Core (EPC) which was designed to pro-
vide higher capacity, all-IP support and
7
reduced latency. Unlike the hierarchical
architecture used in GPRS and UMTS
core networks, the main design principle
in EPC was to keep the architecture
simple and flat.
LTE Advanced
The LTE-A standard ratified by 3GPP
R10 is the major standard for 4G. Many
of the existing features in R8 are in-
herently supported in LTE-A. In addi-
tion, carrier aggregation up to five com-
ponent carriers, use of relays, higher or-
der MIMO and enhanced Inter-Cell In-
terference Coordination (eICIC) served
as new features in LTE-A. Furthermore
in R11, Coordinated Multi-Point trans-
mission and reception (CoMP) and en-
hanced Self-organizing Network (SON)
are designed as parts of the LTE-A net-
works.
The same as in LTE, the medium
access mechanism in LTE-A adopts
OFDMA for downlink and SC-FDMA
for uplink. The main advantages of
OFDMA include the ability to gain
much frequency diversity through
randomly distributed sub-carriers,
multi-user diversity via assigning con-
tiguous sets of sub-carriers, and adaptive
bandwidth allocation. To increase trans-
mission power efficiency and reduce
the cost of power amplifiers for mobile
stations, SC-FDMA is employed thanks
to its low peak-to-average power ratio.
At the physical layer, adaptive coding
and modulation (ACM) is adopted in
4G systems. With ACM, the modulation
order and the coding rate are fine-tuned
based on the channel state information
to gain the full use of radio channels.
 8 Authors Suppressed Due to Excessive Length
Another technique for data rate
enhancement is channel aggregation
which assembles multiple channels
together to perform data transmission
over wider bandwidth. Furthermore,
LTE-A continues to improve capacity
and reliability through more advanced
MIMO technologies. While single-site
MIMO introduces beamforming, spatial
multiplexing and transmit diversity into
the system, cooperative MIMO facili-
tates CoMP transmission and reception.
Under CoMP, a mobile station is able
to receive signals from multiple base
stations and likewise for the uplink
transmission. By adopting a proper
coordination scheme, the received signal
quality is greatly improved.
Due to the fact that mobile stations
cannot support MIMO with many
antennas, cell-edge users may not obtain
4G-level quality of service although
a large number of antennas can be
installed at the base station. To improve
the performance of these users, relaying
is adopted as a cooperative communi-
cation technique where single-antenna
mobile stations transmit their signals
to the base station via a relay station
that is located much closer to the
cell-edge (Sesia et al 2011). Another
critical requirement for IMT-Advanced
is effective power management. The
aforementioned techniques including
SC-FDMA, advanced multi-antenna
design, and relaying collectively con-
tribute to significant reduction of mobile
station power consumption.
Key Applications
On its journey from 1G to 4G, cellular
networks experienced FDMA-based
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analog systems (NMT, AMPS, TACS),
TDMA-based digital systems (GSM,
GPRS), CDMA-based IP-enabled
systems (WCDMA, HSPA), and
OFDM-based broadband mobile sys-
tems (LTE/LTE-A). The core network of
cellular systems has gradually evolved
from a circuit-switched telephone
network to a packet-switched mobile
network with all-IP capability. Another
trend along with this evolution is that
nowadays cellular technologies are
being developed as a global common
standard in lieu of multiple regional
standards developed in the early years
which were not compatible with each
other.
Cross-References
Analog and Digital Communications
Random Access Technology in Cellular
Networks
Key Technologies in 4G/LTE Network
References
Eberspächer J, Vögel HJ, Bettstetter C, C Hart-
mann C (2009) GSM Architecture, Proto-
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Goldsmith A (2005) Wireless Communications.
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UK
Holm H, Toskala A (2007) WCDMA for
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West Sussex, UK
Korhonen J (2014) Introduction to 4G Mobile
Communications. Artech House, London,
UK
Nordic Mobile Telephone Group (1995) Nordic
Mobile Telephone. Stockholm, Sweden
Sesia S, Toufik I, Baker M (2011) LTE - The
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