Discontinuous transmission

Discontinuous transmission (DTX) is a means by which a mobile telephone is temporarily shut off or muted while the phone lacks a voice input. Discontinuous transmission (DTX) is a means by which a mobile telephone is temporarily shut off or muted while the phone lacks a voice input. 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. 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.