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
I. STATE-OF-THE-ART SYSTEM COMPONENT DEVELOPMENTS
A. Introduction and OutlineThe subject of mobile radio communications has reached a state of maturity over the past two decades, as indicated by the excellent monographs by Jakes This contribution attempts to summarize a range of recent advances in the field of bandwidth-efficient wireless video communications. In this section, we commence our discourse with a brief overview of the wireless scene and, in particular, by considering the video transmission capabilities of the existing and future wireless systems. The geographical variation of the cellular channel capacity is characterized by Section II, as a motivation for invoking burst-by-burst adaptive transceivers [27]- [29]. The nature of co-channel interference (CCI)-which is the most dominant channel impairment in wireless systems-is the topic of Section III, where it is shown that the geographic variation of CCI justifies the employment of multimode transceivers, which are discussed in Section IV. Low-rate video compression aspects are reviewed in Section V, and the performance of the ITU H.263 codec is analyzed in some depth. Our discussions in Sections VI and VII are focused on the performance of reconfigurable video transceivers. Specifically, in Section VI, no power control is used-which is typically the case in cordless telephones, such as DECT and CT2-while in Section VII, power control is employed, which is characteristic of cellular systems, such as GSM [30], etc. Section VIII proposes a near-instantaneously adaptive or burst-by-burst adaptive code-division multiple-access (CDMA) scheme, which can be invoked in the context of the forthcoming 3G systems, in order to enhance their performance. Lastly, our discussions are concluded in Section IX with a range of system design guidelines. Let us now commence our overview of the range of existing and forthcoming wireless systems and their video transmission capabilities.
B. Second-Generation (2G) Wireless SystemsThe existing 2G wireless systems now constitute a mature technology. Although they have not been designed with video communications in mind, with the advent of the specially designed error-resilient, fixed-rate video codecs [27]-[35] proposed by Streit et al., it is nonetheless realistic to provide videophone services over these low-rate schemes. For low-latency interactive videophony these systems have
