Real-time video transmission in UMTS

Abstract

Universal Mobile Telecommunication System is denoted as a 3rd cellular system and has been designed with the objective to be a system with global coverage. With the major improvement of in bandwidth capability the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System will be able to support real time multimedia services. This thesis starts with a presentation of the possible video services that can be exploited in third generation cellular systems. Video services are known to be bandwidth consuming and have rigid requirements to the real time requirements. Though the major increase in available bandwidth in the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System it is not sufficient to support transmission of uncompressed video over wireless networks. MPEG-4 and H.263 (+) are video codecs designed to provide high compression efficiency and error resilient transmission in heterogenous error prone environments. These two codecs contains post-processing mechanisms for to conceal errors due to bit errors, burst errors, packet loss, etc. In addition, the codecs use scalable coding to confront the constantly varying bit-rates available in a wireless network. Scalable coding means that the resolution of a video can be lessened or the quality of the video may be sacrificed to meet the available bandwidth in the network.