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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 Table IV 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 in Table IV. Index Terms - Fixed-rate video coding, QAM video communications, vector-quantized video coding, wireless video telephony.

The video performance benefits of burst-by-burst adaptive modulation are studied, employing a higher-order modulation scheme when the channel is favorable, in order to increase the system's bits per symbol capacity and conversely, invoking a more robust lower order modulation scheme when the channel exhibits inferior channel quality. It is shown that due to the proposed adaptive modem mode switching regime, a seamless video-quality versus channel quality relationship can be established, resulting in error-free video quality right across the operating channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range. The main advantage of the proposed burst-by-burst adaptive transceiver technique is that irrespective of the prevailing channel conditions, the transceiver achieves always the best possible source-signal representation quality--such as video, speech, or audio quality--by automatically adjusting the achievable bitrate and the associated multimedia source-signal representation quality in order to match the channel quality experienced. This is achieved on a near-instantaneous basis under given propagation conditions in order to cater for the effects of path loss, fast-fading, slow-fading, dispersion, co-channel interference, etc. Furthermore, when the mobile is roaming in a hostile out-doors--or even hilly terrain--propagation environment, typically low-order low-rate modem modes are invoked, while in benign indoor environments, predominantly the high-rate high source-signal representation quality modes are employed. Index Terms--AQAM, burst-by-burst adaptive modems, H.263, modulation, video telephony, wireless video.