Mobile Communication – UMTS In Mobile Computing

Mobile Communication – UMTS In Mobile Computing – Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third-generation mobile cellular system developed by ETSI in 1998 based on the technology of GSM.

UMTS employs Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA) radio access technology.

To avoid high costs, UMTS reuses as much infrastructure as possible while introducing new services and higher data rates based on CDMA technology.

The initial installations of UMTS used GSM/GPRS infrastructure and offer only moderate

data rates.

The initial capacity of a UMTS cell is approximately 2 Mbit/s; cell diameters are in the order of 500 m.

UMTS will be used to offload GSM networks and to offer enhanced data rates in cities as a first step.

The goal of future releases was to replace the infrastructure by an (almost) all-IP network.

UMTS offers greater spectral efficiency and bandwidth for mobile network operations.
The technology used in UMTS is also referred to as Freedom of Mobile Multimedia Access (FOMA) or 3GSM.
UMTS is suitable for a bigger framework developed in mid-nineties by ETSI, called Global Multimedia Mobility (GMM).
GMM provides a framework to integrate mobile and fixed computer terminals, many different access networks (GSM, BSS, DECT, ISDN, UMTS, LAN, WAN, CATV, MBS), and several core transport networks (GSM NSS+IN, ISDN+IN, B-ISDN+TINA, TCP/IP).
UMTS provides several bearer services, real-time and non-real-time services, circuit and packet-switched transmission and many different data rates.

UMTS uses Wideband CDMA as the radio transmission standard.

UMTS employs a 5 MHz channel bandwidth.

Using this bandwidth UMTS has the capacity to carry over 100 simultaneous voice calls.

Hence, UMTS can carry data at speeds up to 2 Mbps.

UMTS Architecture

UMTS system uses the same network as the GPRS and it uses a new radio interface.

The new radio network of UMTS is called UTRAN

The full form of is UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network.

It is connected to the core network (CN) of GPRS via Iu interface.

The Iu is the UTRAN interface between the radio network controller RNC and Core Network.

The following figure shows the complete architecture of UMTS.