Transmission of multimedia services over GPRS using MPEG-4 coded video

The proliferation of second-generation personal communications systems is rapidly changing consumers´ perceptions of the services that should be expected from a personal communications terminal. In this view, the 3^rd generation mobile systems such as ETSI´s Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) are being designed from the outset to be able to provide high-quality multimedia and data services. This paper investigates the performance of the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) radio interface to transmit video services coded using the MPEG-4 standard. The GPRS radio channel is characterised and the perceptual video quality that can be obtained at different channel conditions using different channel coding schemes is examined, as is the required channel allocation in terms of the number of timeslots