Dual-mode vector-quantized low-rate cordless videophone systems for indoors and outdoors applications

Abstract

Dual-mode reconfigurable wireless videophone transceivers are proposed for noise-, rather than interference-limited indoors and outdoors applications and their video quality, bit rate, robustness, and complexity issues are analyzed. A suite of fixed, but arbitrarily programmable low-rate, perceptually weighted vector quantized (VQ) codecs with and without run-length compression (RLC) are contrived for quarter common intermediate format (QCIF) videophone sequences. The 11.36-kb/s Codec 1 is Bose-Chaudhuri-Hochquenghem (BCH) (127,71,9) coded to a rate of 20.32 kb/s and this arrangement is comparatively studied along with the 8-kb/s Codec 2 and BCH (127,50,13) scheme, which has the same 20.32-kb/s overall rate. The source-sensitivity matched Systems 1-6 characterized in a table were contrived to comparatively study the range of system design options. For example, using Codec 1 in System 1 and coherent pilot symbol assisted 16-level quadrature amplitude modulation (16-PSAQAM), an overall signaling rate of 9 kBd was yielded, if the noise-limited channel had a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in excess of about 22 dB in the vicinity of the basestation or in indoors scenarios. In contrast, over lower quality outdoors channels near the fringes of the cell, the more robust 4-QAM mode of operation had to be invoked, which required twice as many time slots to accommodate the resulting 18-kBd stream and hence, reduced the total number of users supported. The robustness of Systems 2-4, and 6 was increased using automatic repeat requests (ARQ), again, inevitably reducing the number of users supported, which was between 6 and 16. In a bandwidth of 200 kHz, similarly to the Pan-European GSM mobile radio system's speech channel, using Systems 1, 3, 4, or 5, for example, 16 and eight videophone users can be supported in the 16- and 4-QAM modes, respectively, while in dual-mode cells the number of users is between eight and 16. The basic system characteristics are highlighted.