Um interface

The Um interface is the air interface for the GSM mobile telephone standard. It is the interface between the mobile station (MS) and the Base transceiver station (BTS). It is called Um because it is the mobile analog to the U interface of ISDN. Um is defined in the GSM 04.xx and 05.xx series of specifications. Um can also support GPRS packet-oriented communication.

The layers of GSM are initially defined in GSM 04.01 Section 7 and roughly follow the OSI model. Um is defined in the lower three layers of the model.

The Um physical layer is defined in the GSM 05.xx series of specifications, with the introduction and overview in GSM 05.01. For most channels, Um L1 transmits and receives 184-bit control frames or 260-bit vocoder frames over the radio interface in 148-bit bursts with one burst per timeslot. There are three sublayers:

Um on the physical channel has 26 TDMA frames each frame consisting of 114 info bits each. The length of 26 TDMA frame also called Multi-frame is 120 ms apart.

GSM uses GMSK or 8PSK modulation with 1 bit per symbol which produces a 13/48 MHz (270.833 kHz or 270.833 K symbols/second) symbol rate and a channel spacing of 200 kHz. Since adjacent channels overlap, the standard does not allow adjacent channels to be used in the same cell. The standard defines several bands ranging from 400 MHz to 1990 MHz. Uplink and downlink bands are generally separated by 45 or 50 MHz (at the low-frequency end of the GSM spectrum) and 85 or 90 MHz (at the high-frequency end of the GSM spectrum). Uplink/downlink channel pairs are identified by an index called the ARFCN. Within the BTS, these ARFCNs are given arbitrary carrier indexes C0..Cn-1, with C0 designated as a Beacon Channel and always operated at constant power.

GSM has physical and logical channels. The logical channel is time-multiplexed into 8 timeslots, with each timeslot lasting for 0.577ms and having 156.25 symbol periods. These 8 timeslots form a frame of 1,250 symbol periods. Channels are defined by the number and position of their corresponding burst period. The capacity associated with a single timeslot on a single ARFCN is called a physical channel (PCH) and referred to as "CnTm" where n is a carrier index and m is a timeslot index (0-7).

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