The near future will witness the universal deployment of the third-generation mobile access networks that are expected to revolutionise the world of telecommunications. In addition to conventional voice communication services provided by the second-generation GSM networks, the third-generation mobile networks will support a greatly enhanced range of services due to the higher throughput made available by embracing a number of new access technologies. These include TDMA and a variety of CDMA radio access families such as the direct sequence Wideband-CDMA (WCDMA) and multi-carrier CDMA | Compressed Video Communications Abdul Sadka Copyright 2002 John Wiley Sons Ltd ISBNs 0-470-84312-8 Hardback 0-470-84671-2 Electronic 5 Video Communications Over Mobile IP Networks Introduction The near future will witness the universal deployment of the third-generation mobile access networks that are expected to revolutionise the world of telecommunications. In addition to conventional voice communication services provided by the second-generation GSM networks the third-generation mobile networks will support a greatly enhanced range of services due to the higher throughput made available by embracing a number of new access technologies. These include TDMA and a variety of CDMA radio access families such as the direct sequence Wideband-CDMA WCDMA and multi-carrier CDMA. Consequently the most prominent development brought forward by the third-generation family of standards and protocols namely IMT-2000 compared to second-generation GSM systems is the provision of high data rates that will enable the support of a wide range of real-time mobile multimedia services including combinations of video speech audio and data text traffic streams with QoS control Third-generation Partnership project . This chapter examines the issues involved in the provision of video services over the and 3G mobile networks and evaluates the perceived service quality resulting from video transmissions over these networks under various operating conditions. The focus will also be on describing and analysing the performance of a number of tools specifically designed to improve the perceptual video quality over the new mobile access networks. Evolution of 3G Mobile Networks The second-generation GSM technology has resulted in a major success for the delivery of telephony and low bit rate data services to mobile end users. On the other hand the tremendous growth of the Internet has given rise to a new range of multimedia applications that have penetrated the global market at an .
