Generic Mobile Reference Architecture

A Generic Framework for Mobile Communications.

Generic Mobile Architecture

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The different generations of mobile phone technology are based on a similar mobile network architecture. In order to help the understanding of the architecture of 2G, 3G and 4G networks; a generic mobile reference architecture is presented here. There are a number of different nomenclature for essentially the same thing running through these architectures. This model is an attempt to help compare the architectures for these different names and models.

Overall there are 4 different aspects to the Generic Mobile Architecture :

  • Mobile device. This is the device that the user uses to connect to the network. Often though of as the moble phone but other devices can connect to the mobile network.
  • Wireless Network Through this the wireless network, the Mobile Device connects.
  • Base Station which is the receiving mast and transceiver that takes the wireless signal and moves this onto the core network usually through fibre.
  • =Core Network that takes the communications from the Base Station and makes decision about what to do with the signal plus the management of the subscriber's access to the network.

The table below gives an overview of the different components in 2G / 3G / 4G / 5G networks.

2G3G4G5g
User equipment Mobile Station User Equipment LTE User Equipment 5G User Equipment
Wireless Communications 900 / 1800 MHz 2.1GHz 800 and 2.6GHz 700MHz and 3.4-3.8GHz
Base Station Base Station Subsystem BTS / BSC Node B eNode B gNodeB
Operational Support OMC VLR HLR AUC EIR OMC VLR HLR AUC EIR MME HSS MME HSS 5G
Core Network Mobile Switching Centre Serving GPRS Support Node and Gateway GSN Serving Gateway and Packet Gateway 5G Evolved Packet Core
Trunk Network PSTN IP IP IP