Interactive Cellular and Cordless Video Telephony: State-of-the-Art System Design Principles and Expected Performance

Second-generation (2G) mobile radio standards have not been designed with video communications in mind, although the employment of error-resilient, constant-bit-rate proprietary video codecs over these systems is realistic. The third-generation (3G) systems are capable of providing higher rates and better communications integrity in support of video applications. This paper advocates the employment of burst-by-burst adaptive transceivers, which are capable of accommodating the time-variant channel quality fluctuation of wireless channels. This paper is concluded with a range of performance figures and system design guidelines for wireless systems. Keywords—Burst-by-burst adaptive video transmission, H.263 codec, joint detection CDMA, MPEG4 codec, power control, 3G systems, 2G systems, video, video over cordless telephones, video telephony, wireless video, wireless video communications