Mobile multimedia services for third generation communications systems

The growth of digital cellular telephony has created demand for rich multimedia services similar to what we have come to expect of wire-line communications. The applications are far reaching such as video conferencing, emergency medical consultation and directions to m-commerce, remote site surveying and embedded navigational systems. Global standards bodies such as 3GPP, ETSI, ARIB and ITU-T have converged upon the next generation infrastructure capable of providing broadband services to mobile devices in the form of packet switched WCDMA. The focus of our research is on error resilient coding earmarked to reach data rates ranging from 144 Kbps to 2 Mbps on the uplink with the aim of substantial performance improvements. Toward this end we present a two-fold approach, focusing on error-resilient video coding and smart antennae for robust transmission. An accurate simulation of the end-to-end system was implemented using SPW, with performance measured in terms of PSNR and bit error rates