Christian Dubuc

The design and simulated performance of a mobile video telephony application for satellite third-generation wireless systems

The design and performance of a low bit-rate video telephony service for mobile third-generation (3G) systems is presented. The ITU-T G.723.1 speech coding and the ITU-T H.263 video coding recommendations are used, as proposed by the ITU-T H.324 low bit-rate multimedia communications recommendation. The target bit-rate for the H.324 service is 64 kb/s. The design is performed in conjunction with that of a wideband-code division multiple access (W-CDMA) radio transmission technology (RTT) system, proposed by the European Space Agency (ESA) for the satellite component of the ITU IMT-2000 standard. Most of the results could also be applied to the 3G terrestrial systems. The use of concatenated channel coding with convolutional inner coding and Reed-Solomon (RS) outer coding is investigated. Service designs based on equal error protection (EEP) and unequal error protection (UEP) schemes for the audio and video sources are compared. The simulation of the proposed video telephony services shows that significantly more graceful video and audio degradation is obtained with the proposed UEP scheme than with a more straightforward EEP method. The UEP scheme reduces significantly the occurrence of highly annoying audio and video artefacts, allowing satellite-based video telephony services that are compatible with the current Internet-based applications.