VLSI design of rate 2/3 Viterbi decoders

Experiments are conducted using a number of adaptive transmission systems that are suitable for third generation personal communications networks (PCN). It becomes apparent that the selection of the type of modem and number of modulation levels of the modem, the speech codec to be used, and whether to deploy a channel codec, depends on the channel SNR and teletraffic demand if the power consumption of the hand held portable is to be minimised. Following the implications of our experiments, the authors generalise their findings to some of the requirements of an adaptive transceiver that might be deployed in the next generation of mobile radio networks.<>