Pro's and con's of TDMA and CDMA for digital cellular networks

The main differences of today's TDMA (the GSM system family) and CDMA systems (the IS-95 CDMA) and their relative performance are shown. Technical features like frequency hopping, hand-off, hierarchical cell structures, power control, voice activity detection, equalization and RAKE reception are discussed. The speech coder is shown as the most essential part of a system in terms of quality and capacity. A comparison between the two systems is made for the important parameters of range and capacity from the network operators point of view.