Rajib Taid - Mobile Communications Systems Development

Rajib Taid

This edition first published 2021

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Rajib Taid graduated with a Bachelor of Computer Science and Engineering degree from Jorhat Engineering College, Assam, India. He began his career as an Engineer (Telemetry) at GAIL, a public‐sector entity. Rajib worked there for four years in the area of design and development of application software systems for a gas pipeline. Then, he joined a Gurgaon (Haryana, India)‐based communication software services major as well as product development MNC, Aricent Technologies (www.aricent.com), formerly known as Hughes Software Systems, where he started working as a software developer in the area of mobile communications. He worked there for 12 years, both as an individual contributor and in a lead role, primarily developing software in Radio Access Network, and Core Network domains. The author also visited Australia, the USA and the UAE for onsite assignments. He hails from the Jorhat district of Assam, India.

In 2013, Rajib left the mobile telecommunication software development domain and joined BCPL, a public‐sector entity at Dibrugarh, close to his hometown in Assam. Currently, the author specializes in IT and enterprise business information systems management.

Rajib Taid is also a member of the Department Management Committee, as an industry expert, for the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the Dibrugarh University Institute of Engineering and Technology, Assam, India.

Today, we are using at least one smartphone for our day‐to‐day voice, data communications, online gaming, and transaction services. To enable these services, we are also aware of the different mobile communications technologies that are available around us today, such as GSM, GPRS/EDGE, 3G, 4G, and 5G being the latest communication buzzword. If you are wondering and, sometimes, scouring the web regarding how a mobile communications system is designed, developed, tested, and deployed, then this book is for you! This is an introductory jump‐start, foundational, and comprehensive book offering several key concepts encompassing the various practical aspects for the design and development of a mobile communications system and its various entities/elements based on the GSM, GPRS, UMTS (3G), LTE (4G), and 5G technologies. Note that this book is not about the developments of Mobile Application (apps) software that is intended and developed for a specific purpose/requirement.

The content of this book is specially tailored for the rookie computer science or electronics and communications engineering graduate engineer who has just passed out of college, or even for a lesser experienced person looking for an opportunity to work in the mobile telecommunications space through re‐skilling. It starts with the various mobile communications network architectures, identification of a particular network element, the concerned 3GPP standard specifications, various protocols/stacks, as well as the development platforms such as UNIX, and multicore computing. In this book, the reader will also find the troubleshooting of any issue arising out of post‐deployment and operation of a mobile communication network element. This book also introduces the “multicore processor” computing platform that is available around us and is the current buzzword in different areas of technologies, be it the desktop or mobile handset. Mobile telecommunications system development using an embedded system platform is also briefly covered.

A mobile communication network works and communicates based on the standard technical specifications related to a particular mobile communication technology such as the GSM, GPRS, UMTS, LTE, and 5G system. Also, mobile communication standard technical specifications are large in number and can be bewildering to a new learner. Reading and its implementation, through computer code, of the contents of a GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G technical specification requires a substantial amount of effort, especially the Layer 1 and Layer 2 protocols. From a technical specification, one would come to know what to and when to transmit or receive information. But what is not available in the 3GPP technical specifications is the how to implement part as it is implementation dependent. This book was written keeping these facts in mind, so that students can learn the practical, real‐world mobile telecommunications domain subject areas and equip themselves while in college, before starting a career in the relevant domains. To make the contents easier to understand, necessary figures, tables, and sample codes are provided to illustrate the underlying concepts. The illustrative figures and concepts are sometimes general in nature, i.e. applicable for GSM/GPRS or UMTS/LTE/5G system, or all of them, and sometimes a straight copy from the concerned 3GPP technical specification with due permissions.