Performance and characteristics of GSM-based PCS

Personal communication services (PCS) based on the GSM system, also called PCS1900, provides an advanced wireless system concept with a high performance air interface. The combination of techniques such as frequency hopping, equalization, channel coding and spatial diversity help in controlling the hostile radio environment. The performance is evaluated mainly in terms of coverage and capacity, and compared with PCS based on IS-95 CDMA. The results show a coverage advantage for GSM-based PCS (PCS1900) corresponding to fewer required base stations than for IS-95 CDMA. The reason is the large frequency diversity that is possible with PCS1900. The capacity in terms of channels/sector is comparable for the two systems. When using the same speech coder rate, PCS1900 will have a small capacity advantage. The concept using hierarchical cell structures for achieving a high system capacity per km ² in a flexible way, is only supported by PCS1900