Abbreviations for Mobile Telephony

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Motivation

For some years now, the telecommunications systems literature has been developing a "language" of its own that seems to consist mostly of abbreviations and acronyms.

In fact, the UEQ ("Universal Examination Question") in telecommunications systems might be referred to as ETFA ("Expand the Following Acronyms"), without requiring any definitions other than the list of words represented by the abbreviation.

It seemed there might be some use in publishing a web page with some of these acronyms and abbreviations spelled out so that people can look them up in machine-readable format. Many telecommunications books, and a great many student reports, come with many pages of printed acronyms, which this author finds just as tedious to look up each time as he found referring to vocabulary in French, Latin, and German primers.

Of course, one can argue that a specialist language is best learned by the use of it, but dictionary services would seem to be an important tool nevertheless.

Meta-resources available on the web

A lightning search of resources already posted on the WWW for these purposes reveals the following....

But a cursory inspection finds nothing of the breadth and depth of the ten densely printed pages of abbreviations and acronyms in a common 3G ("third generation") phone technology textbook, so there seemed to be some point in reproducing this kind of information here.

For instance, who would have thought that an ordinary mobile phone handset is commonly referred to as the UE ("User Equipment")?

And this kind of thing rapidly leads to people writing passages such as

PMM-connected

In this state, the location of the UE is known in the SGSN to an RNC, the UE has previously established a GMM context (or is about to do so) and there is an active PS signalling connection between the UE and the PS CN. The location of the UE is tracked by the UTRAN, but the UE still needs to perform RAUs whenever the UE identifies that the RA has changed. With an active PS signalling connection, the UE has an active RRC connection, and so the UE is notified of changes in the RAI either through broadcast messages (CELL_FACH, CELL_PCH or URA_PCH states) or through the RRC mobility signalling messages (CELL_DCH state). The UE does not need to perform periodic RAUs while in the PMM-CONNECTED state.

Even with the aid of the glossary included in the book from which this extract is taken, or with the aid of the meta-links of this section, such writing has to be agreed to be pretty much impenetrable, and of doubtful utility to people who do not happen to know the subject matter so well (to start with) that they have no need to read the book.

Complex Systems remarks

In the natural world, complex systems display emergent properties when many simple component parts are caused to interact. In the same way, in the man-made (engineered) world we see the same "emergence of complexity" from what are really rather simple beginnings. This emergence brings with it the same problems of adaptation and robustness as we see in nature at large.

In the case of a cell net phone system, the basic ideas are really rather simple. The area to be covered is divided into a large number of cells, each served by a local transmitter/receiver pair that communicate with mobile handsets inside the cell. The cells are then linked in a terrestrial network, and thereby mobile handsets which might otherwise be out of range of each other are enabled to communicate.

The complexity arises from handling, simultaneously, very large numbers of pairs of such communicators. This complexity spills over into the nomenclature of the descriptions of the required protocols, and we see this in the list below which is taken (with adaptations) from a text called "WCDMA" by A Richardson (Cambridge 2005, ISBN 0-521-82815-5) in which the title is itself an acronym from its own list of acronyms. This is nicely self-referential, as are many complex systems.

So-called "Third Generation" mobile communication has, at the time of writing, still to make a significant impact on the bulk of communications on the planet. It will indeed be interesting to see whether the engineered complexity (see complexsim.html on these pages) will stand up to the demands of the wider world.

Note that the title "telephony" in this page subsumes all the other kinds of data-based communications that people have/will come to expect from their handsets. However, both in the UK ("mobile phones") and the US ("cell phones") these devices persist in calling themselves phones. We recall the historical sequence of "Wireless - - radio - - wireless" in the fashions for the nomenclature of remote-to-remote communication.

An antidote to complexity and woffle

The BBC has the following comments on 21st May 2005.

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Lists of mobile phone technology abbreviations and acronyms.

Copyright © D.Jefferies 2005.
D.Jefferies email
21st May 2005.