Base Station Controller (BSC)

The part of the wireless system's infrastructure that controls one or multiple cell sites' radio signals, thus reducing the load on the switch. Performs radio signal management functions for base transceiver stations, managing functions such as frequency assignment and handoff. (Cingular)

Base Station Controller

The Base Station Controller (BSC) provides, classicaly, the intelligence behind the BTSs. Typically a BSC has 10s or even 100s of BTSs under its control. The BSC handles allocation of radio channels, receives measurements from the mobile phones, controls handovers from BTS to BTS (except in the case of an inter-MSC handover in which case control is in part the responsibility of the Anchor MSC). A key function of the BSC is to act as a concentrator where many different low capacity connections to BTSs (with relatively low utilisation) become reduced to a smaller number of connections towards the Mobile Switching Center (MSC) (with a high level of utilisation). Overall, this means that networks are often structured to have many BSCs distributed into regions near their BTSs which are then connected to large centralised MSC sites.

The BSC is undoubtly the most robust element in the BSS as it is not only a BTS controller but, for some vendors, a full switching center, as well as an SS7 node with conections to the MSC and SGSN. It also provides all the required data to the Network Management Subsystem (NMS) as well as to the performance measuring centers.

The databases for all the sites, including information such as carrier frequencies, frequency hopping lists, power reduction levels, receiving levels for cell border calculation, are stored in the BSC. This data is obtained directly from radio planning engineering which involves modelling of the signal propagation as well as traffic projections.-

(Wikipedia)