Teaching Protocol Exchanges Over Cellular Air Interfaces

Abstract

The evolutionary path taken by cellular standards to the current and future standards is incomplete without fully understanding the older standards. The comprehension of the GSM standard, specifically the procedures for protocols exchange over the air interface will help students understand radio resource allocation procedures in GPRS and UMTS, and will ultimately assist future communication engineers to be able to design and solve problems related to these cellular standards. In this paper we describe the novel architecture of our teaching software, developed and programmed in Java. We present all the user interfaces and show how it can be used to assist in teaching, by presenting how the Mobile station and the GSM/GPRS network exchange data frames over the air interface with their associated protocols. Finally the uniqueness of this teaching tool was proved from the stand point of our modular architecture.

Teaching Protocol Exchanges Over Cellular Air Interfaces

“…We have developed user interfaces and integrate them with the existing ones (windows) to be able to study and comprehend the procedures of radio resource allocation and downlink signaling counter (DSC) [13] in GSM/GPRS systems for SAGEM OT190/OT290. We highlight the modular features of our learning software tool in Figure 3 and developed the drivers for the two trace MSs used.…”

“…We validated the operation of this software tool by performing extensive decoding of GSM L3 frames, RLC/MAC blocks and the GPRS L3 messages using GSM TS in [13]. Clandestine testing of this learning software was only done and used for teaching purposes at the ENST-Paris, France and could not be done in South Africa because of the copyright issue.…”

“…We have shown and described a few of the traces obtained above. Through laboratory exercises, we have performed extensive decoding (translation of octets in the frames exchanged) using [3] - [8]; the work carried out on decoding of frames can be found in [13].…”