12 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
Figure 1.8: (a) Time-division multiplexing of five digital voice channels operating at 64 kb/s;
(b) frequency-division multiplexing of three analog signals.
the channel bandwidth so that the channel spectra do not overlap, as seen Fig. 1.8(b).
FDM is suitable for both analog and digital signals and is used in broadcasting of radio
and television channels. TDM is readily implemented for digital signals and is com-
monly used for telecommunication networks. It is important to realize that TDM and
FDM can be implemented in both the electrical and optical domains; optical FDM is
often referred to as WDM. Chapter 8 is devoted to optical-domain multiplexing tech-
niques. This section covers electrical TDM, which is employed universally to multiplex
a large number of voice channels into a single electrical bit stream.
The concept of TDM has been used to formdigital hierarchies. In North America
and Japan, the first level corresponds to multiplexing of 24 voice channels with a com-
posite bit rate of 1.544 Mb/s (hierarchy DS-1), whereas in Europe 30 voice channels
are multiplexed, resulting in a composite bit rate of 2.048 Mb/s. The bit rate of the
multiplexed signal is slightly larger than the simple product of 64 kb/s with the number
of channels because of extra control bits that are added for separating (demultiplexing)
the channels at the receiver end. The second-level hierarchy is obtained by multiplex-
ing 4 DS-1 TDM channels. This results in a bit rate of 6.312 Mb/s (hierarchy DS-2)
for North America or Japan and 8.448 Mb/s for Europe. This procedure is continued to
obtain higher-level hierarchies. For example, at the fifth level of hierarchy, the bit rate
becomes 565 Mb/s for Europe and 396 Mb/s for Japan.