Visual Media Coding and Transmission

7.3 Conclusions

Mobile and multimedia communication technologies have experienced rapid growth and commercial success during the last decade. Driven by the powerful vision of being able to communicate from anywhere, at any time, and with any type of data, the integration of multimedia and mobile technologies is currently underway. Third/fourth-generation communication systems will support a wide range of communication services for mobile users from any geographical location, in a variety of formats such as voice, data, images, and video. Among those, video communication is particularly demanding, due to the stringent requirements on QoS and the enormous amounts of data involved, for example in 3D video.

This chapter has given an overview of the technologies and concepts involved in provisioning multimedia communications over wireless access networks. The first half dealt with recent advances in supporting QoS in wireless networks and multimedia technologies. A description of the constraints involved in wireless multimedia communications was given, describing the scarcity of bandwidth, the error characteristics of wireless channels, and the lack of network support. The role of media compression technologies, in particular error-robust low-bit rate video codec design, was also discussed. A variety of techniques have been proposed for increasing the quality of the transmitted media stream over error-prone wireless links. These techniques are categorized into joint source–channel coding, ...