Discontinuous transmission

Misconception[edit]
A common misconception is that DTX improves capacity by freeing up TDMA time slots for
use by other conversations. In practice, the unpredictable availability of time slots makes this
difficult to implement. However, reducing interference is a significant component in how GSM
and other TDMA based mobile phone systems make better use of the available spectrum
compared to older analog systems such as AMPS and NMT. While older network types
theoretically allocated two 25–30 kHz channels per conversation, in practice some radios
would cause interference on neighbouring channels making them unusable, and a single
radio may broadcast too strong an oval signal pattern to let nearby cells reuse the same
channel.
GSM combines short packet sizes, frequency hopping, redundancy, power control, digital
encoding, and DTX to minimize interference and the effects of interference on a
conversation. In this respect, DTX indirectly improves the over-all capacity of a network.

Packet radio systems[edit]

In packet radio systems such as GPRS/EDGE, it is possible to combine DTX with capacity
increase when VoIP is used for telephony. In such cases, resources freed up when one user
is in silence can be used to serve another user. The increase of the number of users will
contribute to the interference level. Systems that use voice codecs such as AMR can
reduce vocoder rate adaptively to better combat interference.
Systems based upon CDMA air interfaces such as IS-95/CDMA2000, and most forms
of UMTS, can use a form of implied DTX by usage of a variable rate codec such as AMR. As
with the packet radio systems above, when one side of the conversion is silent, the amount
of transmitted data is minimized. Again, the effect is reduced interference.
In wireless transmitters, VAD is sometimes called voice-operated transmission (VOX).

Technical details[edit]

 SP flag = 0 indicates SID frame

 SP flag = 1 indicates speech frame
Speech frame = 260 samples
Transmit side

 TX DTX handle performs speech encoding, comfort noise computation, voice activity
detection
 TX Radio Subsystem (RSS):
Performs SP flag monitoring and Channel coding
Hangover period
After the transition from VAD=1 to VAD=0, a "hangover period" of N+1 consecutive
frames is required to make a new updated SID frame available. The bursts are
directly passed to RSS with SP=1.
Background noise spikes can often be confused with the speech frame and hence,
in order to nullify this issue, a check list for SID computation is Nelapsed >23, old
SID is utilized with VAD=0.
Once after the end of speech SID is computed it is continuously passed to the RSS
marked with SP=0 as long as VAD=0.
If a SID (SP=0) is chosen for transmission is stolen for FACCH signaling than the
subsequent frame is scheduled for transmission