CHAPTER ONE

1.1            INTRODUCTION

Global system for mobile communication (GSM), is a digital telephone system that digitalizes and compresses data to help improve the speed of wireless mobile when communicating... (answers.yahoo.com/question/index3/11/09). GSM is one of the leading digital cellular systems that use narrowband Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) which allows eight simultaneous calls on the same radio frequency (Webopedia.internet.com/img/mock/rcat-new.gif.12/10/09). This system of communication is far more advanced than the traditional analogue cellular technology (Computer.com/ITNewspaperJan.2002 Pg.11). GSM uses a variation of time division multiple access (TDMA) and is the most widely used of the three digital wireless telephony technologies (TDMA, GSM and DMA).In 2007, more than 690 mobile networks provide GSM services across 213 countries and GSM represents 82.4% of all global mobile connections. According to GSM world, there are now more than 2 billion GSM mobile phone users worldwide. The number of mobile subscriptions the world is expected to see by the end of the ongoing year (2009) is reportedly heading for 4.6 billion as reported by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) secretary, recently (Softpedia.mht.14/10/09).

One of the objectives for the GSM-based platform was to offer advanced services and functionality from a single network, and to meet this goal, the designers made it part of the standard and based the architecture on the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) called model. (Comptuer.com/ITNewspaperl.Jan. 2002

Pg.11).

GSM services are a standard collection of applications and features available to mobile phone subscribers all over the world and are the world’s most dominant mobile phone standard. The design of the service is moderately complex because it must be able to locate a moving phone of the same service anywhere in the world. The GSM standard also provides separate facilities for transmitting digital data. This allows a mobile phone to act like any other computer on the Internet, sending and receiving data via the Internet protocol (Wikipedia, 2009). The mobile may also be connected to a desktop computer, laptop or Personal digital Assistants (PDA), for use as a network interface (just like a modem or Ethernet card) (Wikipedia, 2009).