Layer 1 - Physical Layer

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The ISDN Physical Layer is specified by the ITU I-series and G-series documents. The U interface provided by the telco for BRI is a 2-wire, 160 kb/s digital connection. Echo cancellation is used to reduce noise, and data encoding schemes (2B1Q in North America, 4B3T in Europe) permit this relatively high data rate over ordinary single-pair local loops.

2B1Q

2B1Q (2 Binary 1 Quaternary) is the most common signaling method on U interfaces. This protocol is defined in detail in 1988 ANSI spec T1.601. In summary, 2B1Q provides:
Bits Quaternary
Symbol
Voltage
Level
00 -3 -2.5
01 -1 -0.833
10 +3 +2.5
11 +1 +0.833

This means that the input voltage level can be one of 4 distinct levels (note: 0 volts is not a valid voltage under this scheme). These levels are called Quaternaries. Each quaternary represents 2 data bits, since there are 4 possible ways to represent 2 bits, as in the table above.

Frame Format

Each U interface frame is 240 bits long. At the prescribed data rate of 160 kb/s, each frame is therefore 1.5 ms long. Each frame consists of:
Sync
18 bits
12 * (B1 + B2 + D)
216 bits
Maintenance
6 bits

Data is transmitted in a superframe consisting of 8 240-bit frames for a total of 1920 bits (240 octets). The sync field of the first frame in the superframe is inverted (i.e. -3 -3 +3 +3 +3 -3 +3 -3 +3).


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Updated December 5, 2006
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