Adaptive rate multiple access (ARMA) for wireless multimedia communications

A challenge for personal communication system (PCS) is to provide bandwidth demanding multimedia communications such as interactive video and high quality images to portable communication terminals. Such communications, requiring a transport bit-rate in multiples of Mb/s, are readily available via fiber optics using access methods such as the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) with a transport capacity of tens or hundreds of Mb/s. This paper proposes a new channel access, coding, and modulation scheme called adaptive rate multiple access (ARMA) over the wireless channel. ARMA is proposed to inter-network with a wired ATM network, to deal with the severe bit-rate limitations of fading and intersymbol interference (ISI), and the variable bit-rate requirements of multimedia communications