Improvement of GSM system performance due to frequency hopping and/or discontinuous transmission

Frequency hopping and discontinuous transmission are techniques that can be adopted in order to improve performance of a mobile communication system; the former exploits the frequency and interference diversity, the latter through the increase of spectral efficiency due to the reduction of interference during silent periods. This paper aims at showing how the frequency hopping technique combined or not with discontinuous transmission can improve GSM system performance in a realistic scenario. The results presented, have been obtained using a simulation tool (GSM-FH) developed in CSELT and is able to evaluate the performance of a GSM system.