PDH, SDH & Ethernet

PDH/E1
Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy (PDH) was designed to transport the huge
amounts of data over digital equipment like microwave radio or fiber optic
systems.

The E1 frame defines a cyclical set of 32 time slots of 8 bits. The time slot 0 is devoted
to transmission management and time slot 16 for signaling; the rest were assigned
originally for voice/data transport.
The main characteristics of the 2-Mbit/s frame are described in the following.
 As indicated in Fig. SDH frame is made up of a container and a section overhead—section overhead being
further divided into regenerator section overhead (RSOH), administrative unit pointer (AU) and multiplexer
section overhead (MSOH).

 The basic unit of framing in SDH is STM-1 (synchronous transport module-level one), which consists of a
matrix of 9 rows and 270 columns
 Each cell carries one byte= 8 bits.
 Transmission is carried out row by row, starting with the byte in the upper-left corner and ending with the
byte in the lower-right corner.
 After transmission of the last byte in the frame (the byte located in row 9, column 270) is complete, the
whole sequence repeats.
 The frame repetition rate is 125 microseconds; therefore there are 8000 frames per second.
 STM-1 frames is 9×270×8×8000. Thus, the basic STM-1 frame bit rate equals to 155.52Mbits/s.
 SDH is a transport hierarchy based on multiples of 155.52Mbps in which each rate is an exact multiple of the
lower rate;
 Different SDH rates are STM-1 = 155.52Mbps, STM-4 = 622.08Mbps, STM-16 = 2588.32Mbps, STM-64 =
9953.28Mbps and STM-256 = 39813.12Mbps.
 SDH

The SDH multiplexing approach is very flexible and allows several paths to build
the various signal structures, like STM-1, STM-4, STM-16, STM-64 and STM-256

Fig.: Formation of STM-N frame

1. Each E1 signal is mapped into a VC-12, which is then added with a pointer to form a TU-12.
2. Each group of three TU-12 is combined to obtain a TUG-2 (each TUG-2 carrying three E1).
3. Seven TUG-2 are combined to obtain one TUG-3 (each TUG-3 carrying 21 E1).
4. Three VC-3 are grouped to make one VC-4 (each VC-4 carrying 63 E1).
Ethernet
Thank You