Abstract

Mobile network communication system offers the users with seamless communication and this has caused wireless communication to increasingly become the preferred method of carrying multimedia traffic or messages such as voice, video, images, and data files. Time division multiple access (TDMA) is the multiple access scheme used in global system for mobile communication (GSM), while third generation (3G) system uses wideband-code division multiple access (W-CDMA). The former is designed majorly for voice and a little of data. Due to the increase in number of phone users and the services enjoyed by the users, there is higher demand for non-voice services, mobile extensions to fixed-line services and richer mobile content. This has caused the network operators to develop 3G system with the goal of providing a network infrastructure that can support a much broader range of services than existing systems in which its penetration level has reached market saturation. This paper presents a comparison of the two wireless systems performance based on their modulation techniques. From the constellation gotten, the two systems were analyzed and the analysis shows that W-CDMA (that is, 3G) provides a network infrastructure that can support a much broader range of services than existing systems (GSM) because the main forces behind development of the 3G have been driven by the second generation systems’ low performance data services, incompatible service in different parts of the world, and lack of capacity.

Key words: Time division multiple access (TDMA), wideband-code division multiple access (W-CDMA), call drop rate, call set-up success rate (CSSR), handover rate, constellation.