Combined source-channel coding schemes for video transmission overan additive white Gaussian noise channel

There has been an increased interest in the transmission of digital video over real-world transmission media, such as the direct broadcast satellite (DBS) channel. Video transmitted over such a channel is subject to degradation due, in part, to additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Some form of forward error-control (FEC) coding may be applied in order to reduce the effect of the noise on the transmitted bitstream; however, determination of the appropriate level of FEC coding is generally an unwieldy and computationally intensive problem, as it may depend upon a variety of parameters such as the type of video, the available bandwidth, and the channel SNR. More specifically, a combined source-channel coding approach is necessary in optimally allocating rate between source and channel coding subject to a fixed constraint on overall transmission bandwidth. In this paper we develop a method of optimal bit allocation under the assumption that the distortion is additive and independent on a frame-by-frame basis. A set of universal operational distortion-rate characteristics is developed which balances the tradeoff between source coding accuracy and channel error protection for a fixed overall transmission rate and provides the basis for the optimal bit allocation approach. The results for specific source and channel coding schemes show marked improvement over suboptimum choices of channel error protection. In addition, we show that our results approach information-theoretic performance bounds which are developed in this work     

Efficient use of the radio spectrum and bandwidth expansion

Using the definition that the most efficient use of the radio-frequency spectrum is that which produces maximum communication with a point or into and through an area, it is shown that considerable bandwidth expansion is required to achieve optimum communication capacity. The effectiveness of digital modulation in trading bandwidth for interference protection is demonstrated in the environment of a dense urban network. The considerable benefits obtained from the use of highly directive antennas with small off-angle response are demonstrated. Effects produced by reflection and scattering from objects on or near the radio path are studied parametrically. It is concluded that very large amounts of communication can be realized in a restricted area and bandwidth if bandwidth expanding digital modulation techniques are employed in combination with high-quality antennas mounted so as to minimize effects of the environment.     

Very-high-speed fibre-optic networks for broadband communications

Single-mode optical fibres have an enormous transmission bandwidth which can support ultra-high-speed digital transmission and networking. The use of electrical signal-processing, however, ultimately limits the network capacity. To eliminate the throughput bottleneck, all-optical processing techniques should be employed in a fibre-optic network. This paper discusses several schemes for implementing optical time division multiple access (OTDMA) networks with the emphasis on optical clock distribution, synchronisation and all-optical detection. The use of a fast-switching bistable laser diode as an all-optical threshold detector and data regenerator is suggested. A dual-wavelength OTDMA technique is investigated, which can be used for digital TV or future HDTV distributions. Moreover, an efficient multiple access scheme, called wavelength division multiple access with optical time division multiplexing (WDMA-OTDM), is proposed for broadband communication services. It is shown that WDMA-OTDM has all the advantages possessed by the individual OTDMA and WDMA schemes but offers improved flexibility and capacity     

A Solution to the Bandwidth Compression Problem--Important Points

The basic problem with all previous methods of bandwidth compression has been that the accuracy of the reconstructed waveform has been poorly controlled. By reconstructing the wavefrom from the compressed digital signal before transmission and creating the error waveform, i.e., substracting the reconstructed from the original waveform to produce the error waveform, followed by adding points to be transmitted, where the error waveform is greater than specified, a process which may be iterated, the residual error in the final reconstructed signal may be reduced to any arbitrary amount. Unlike "run-length coding" only the minimum number of points necessary to reconstruct the waveform are generated. By introducing a time delay, considerable bandwidth compression would be possible while keeping predetermined accuracy specifications.     

Transmission of video telephony images over wireless channels

In this paper, the effects of digital transmission errors on H.263 codecs are analyzed and the transmission of H.263 coded video over a TDMA radio link is investigated. The impact of channel coding and interleaving on video transmission quality is simulated for different channel conditions. Fading on radio channels causes significant transmission errors and H.263 coded bit streams are very vulnerable to erros. Powerful Forward Error Correction (FEC) codes are therefore necessary to protect the data so that it can be successfully transmitted at acceptable signal power levels. FEC, however, imposes a high bandwidth overhead. In order to make best use of the available channel bandwidth and to alleviate the overall impact of errors on the video sequence, a twolayer data partitioning and unequal error protection scheme based on H.263 is also studied. The scheme can tolerate more transmission errors and leads to more graceful degradation in quality when the channel SNR decreases. In lossy environments, it can improve the video transmission quality at no extra bandwidth cost.Part of this paper was presented at IS&T/SPIE Symposium on Electronic Imaging, San Jose, CA, USA, January 1996.     

Design of orthogonal pulse shapes for communications viasemidefinite programming

In digital communications, orthogonal pulse shapes are often used to represent message symbols for transmission through a channel. In this paper, the design of such pulse shapes is formulated as a convex semidefinite programming problem, from which a globally optimal pulse shape can be efficiently found. The formulation is used to design filters that achieve (a) the minimal bandwidth for a given filter length; (b) the minimal filter length for a given bandwidth; (c) the maximal robustness to timing error for a given bandwidth and filter length. Bandwidth is measured either in spectral energy concentration terms or with respect to a spectral mask. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by the design of waveforms with substantially improved performance over the “chip” waveforms specified in standards for digital mobile telecommunications     

Multiuser soft interference canceler via iterative decoding for DSLapplications

This paper presents a method to mitigate interference on a transmission system by another system with an overlapping frequency band. The systems are uncoordinated so that they cannot be made to transmit in orthogonal coding space. The transmission environment is an interference channel rather than the multiaccess channel often considered in other multiuser detection problems, for instance at the base station of a code division multiple access wireless system. Using the fact that the inputs are all from discrete constellations, it is possible to use a multiuser maximum-likelihood (ML) detector to decode the signals from the system of interest with low probability of error. However, the ML detector often requires impractical computation. A soft linear canceler is instead used to reduce the interference with a small loss of bandwidth in the system of interest. The method has a much lower complexity than a full-blown ML detector, and the soft canceler performance is close to an ML detector. The method is demonstrated on a very-high-speed digital subscriber lines system with a home local area network interference. The system of interest is using a multicarrier modulation transmission scheme such as discrete multitone, while the interfering system transmits using quadrature amplitude modulation     

Capacity of wideband TDMA digital mobile radio cellular schemes

Wideband TDMA digital cellular mobile radio schemes can offer a capacity similar to that of analogue modulation schemes. To find the optimum coding to be used a balance must be made between bandwidth, power and number of channels. A comparison is made for an idealised system using QPSK transmission and biorthogonal coding. Coding with a bandwidth expansion of 2.7 is shown to provide a good capacity at low carrier/noise ratio and an acceptable error rate.     

Towards the fundamental limits of optical-fiber communications

We review the theoretical limits which restrict transmission over optical fibers. The fundamental limit on channel capacity is 1 nat/photon with a coherent detection receiver or with a thermal-noise-limited receiver. With an ideal photon-counting receiver, the theoretical capacity is infinite. A practical limit of a few nats per photon for direct detection requires a bandwidth expansion consistent with monomode fibers and fast digital circuits and is 35-40 dB better than current direct detection receivers. This limit may be approached by receiver improvements (10 dB with direct detection, 17 dB with optimum coherent detection), by using digital pulse-position modulation (PPM) (10-13 dB) and by using error-correcting codes where constraints on system complexity allow.     

Fiber-optic subcarrier multiplexing video transport employingmultilevel QAM

The technical feasibility of applying a fiber-optic multilevel QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) subcarrier multiplexing scheme to a multichannel conventional TV signal transport is explored. This transport scheme has some advantageous features. Because a digital subcarrier modulation scheme is used, a high-quality transmission performance is expected to be achieved, if the bit error is sufficiently small over a transmission line and the required carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) is relatively small among the many candidates of subcarrier modulation schemes. The use of multilevel modulation allows the bandwidth to be efficiently utilized; consequently, up to 40-channel uncompressed digital TV signals are estimated to be accommodated in the frequency region of the VHF and UHF bands, where well-developed and inexpensive electronics can be easily applied     

An 8-b 100-MSample/s CMOS pipelined folding ADC

Although cascading reduces the number of folders used in folding analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), it demands wider bandwidth. The pipelining scheme proposed in this work greatly alleviates the wide bandwidth requirement of the folding amplifier. The pipelining is implemented with simple differential-pair folders. The key idea is to use odd multiples of folders with distributed interstage track/holds cooperatively with an algorithm for coding and digital error correction for the nonbinary system. The pipelined folding ADC prototyped using 0.5-μm CMOS exhibits a differential nonlinearity (DNL) of ±0.4 LSB and an integral nonlinearity (INL) of ±1.3 LSB at 100 MSample/s. The chip occupies 1.4 mm×1.2 mm in active area and consumes 165 mW at 5 V     

Multi-service applications on high modal bandwidth glass multimode fibre

The work reported deals with the demonstration of the use of high modal bandwidth OM4 multimode fibre as multi-purpose transmission media for short-range indoor or outdoor applications taking advantage of the wavelength division multiplexing concept. Simultaneous transmission of a digital 10 GbE signal and a radio-frequency multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing ultra-wide band (band group 5) signal at 480 Mbits has been successfully achieved over 1.1 km fibre length without any error and with relative constellation error (RCE) less than 5.5% rms, respectively. Concerning the radio signal, an additional 1 m-long wireless path has also been demonstrated that led to an overall RCE value of 7.2%.     

大气无线光通信系统中数字脉冲间隔调制研究

基于光强闪烁的大气无线光通信系统模型,研究了数字脉冲间隔调制(DPIM)方式的差错性能,分析了符号结构、发射功率、带宽需求等问题,并与 OOK(开关键控)和 PPM(脉冲位置调制)调制方式进行比较。理论和仿真研究结果表明,DPIM 调制方式较 PPM 方式有较高的功率效率和较少的带宽需求,特别是在系统实现上相对于 PPM 大大简化。因此 DPIM 应用于无线光通信系统具有一定优势。     

Correlative coding: A bandwidth-efficient signaling scheme

In most transmission channels, bandwidth is at a premium and an important attribute of any good digital signaling scheme is its ability to make efficient use of the bandwidth. Conventional Nyquist-type pulse amplitude modulation signaling schemes, which are designed to eliminate intersymbol interference, achieve high data rates only at the expense of a large number of signal levels. In many applications, correlative coding or partial response signaling, which introduces intersymbol interference in a controlled way, is able to achieve high data rates with fewer levels and hence with better error rate performance. In addition to higher data rates, correlative schemes achieve convenient spectral shapes and have error-detecting capabilities without introducing redundancy into the data stream. This paper explains how correlative schemes work and why they are advantageous.     

Digital transmission of high bit rate signals using 16DAPSK-OFDMmodulation scheme

Radio transmission signals are distorted by multipath propagation and signal level fading in the channel. In the case of digital transmission systems, the distortion of signals causes a degradation of bit error performance. It is an especially severe problem with digital outside-broadcasting-link (OBL) which has to transmit, for example, digital HDTV signals at more than about 45 Mbps. The OFDM modulation scheme can mitigate the adverse effects of multipath fading. An experimental OFDM modem has been developed to enable stable transmission of digital HDTV sources in an OBL. The experimental modem distributes transmitting digital data to 688 carriers in a bandwidth of about 13.5 MHz using the 16DAPSK for each OFDM carrier. A combination of 8DPSK and 2DASK is adopted as the 16DAPSK and another combination of 8DPSK and coherent 2ASK instead of 2DASK is also considered. Indoor transmission experiments confirmed that the 16DAPSK-OFDM is feasible for transmitting high bit rate signals, even under severe propagation conditions     

紫外光通信调制方式的对比研究

紫外光非视距通信是一种新型的无线光通讯形式,近年来受到各军事强国越来越广泛的关注。详细分析了启闭键控调制(OOK)、脉冲位置调制(PPM)、差分脉冲位置调制(DPPM)和数字脉冲间隔调制(DPIM)的编码结构,然后从带宽需求、平均发射功率、传输容量和差错性能等方面对各种调制方式进行了仿真对比。结果表明,DPIM调制比PPM具有更高的传输容量和更少的带宽需求,并且解调对同步要求较低,实现更简易,并结合紫外LED阵列将作为今后实用化紫外光源的发展趋势,DPIM调制在未来紫外光通信系统的应用中将具有更大的优势。     

Design of multiple MMSE subequalizers for faster-than-Nyquist-rate transmission

We consider an equalization problem when the transmitted symbol rate is higher than the available channel bandwidth. This situation can happen in the uplink of the voiceband pulse-code modulation (PCM) modems whose transmit signal bandwidth is larger than the available channel bandwidth. Although the use of a minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) pre-equalizer is considered in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)-T V.92 Recommendation, it may not provide an acceptable performance unless the channel condition is mild. As another approach to this problem, we consider the use of a bank of subequalizers, each of which compensates the part of the channel distortion, enabling the PCM-mode transmission over the channel where the V.92 scheme may fail. In this paper, a multiple subequalizer scheme is optimally designed in the MMSE sense, and its performance is compared with the MMSE pre-equalizer of V.92 in terms of the bit-rate-normalized signal-to-noise ratio.     

An Experimental 560 Mbits/s Repeater with Integrated Circuits

The bandwidth penalty of digital systems is very obvious in the case of transmission over coaxial cables because of the exponential increse of cable attenuation with square root of frequency. From capacity point of view, it is only at very high information rates (> 500 Mbit/s typically) that a digital system might be competitive with an analog system, because the disadvantage of noise accumulation in an analog system ultimately cancels the bandwidth penalty of the digital system. In addition, it is, however, difficult to realize common functions, such as amplification, equalization, regeneration, clock extraction, etc. with electronic components having a frequency range comparable to the frequency range of the information signal, which extends from zero frequency to the microwave range. Besides, the complexity of a regenerative repeater should be kept to a minimum for reliability reasons. It is shown in the paper that with present-day technology a 560 Mbit/s repeater can be constructed, operating in sections of 1.5 km coaxial cable (2.6/9.5 mm). Also, we demonstrate that new technologies exist which may lead to repeaters with a high degree of monolithic integration, even at such a speed, which is important from the reliability viewpoint. The constructed and described repeater is characterized by unconventional and economic design of amplifier/equalizer and clock extractor and by monolithically integrated decision circuits.     

Scalable video coding over RTP and MPEG-2 transport stream in broadcast and IPTV channels - seamless content delivery in the future mobile internet

The ITU-T and ISO/IEC standard for scalable video coding was recently finalized. SVC allows for scalability of the video bitstream in the temporal, spatial, or fidelity domain, or any combination of those. Video scalability may be used for different purposes, such as saving bandwidth when the same media content is required to be sent simultaneously on a broadcast medium at different resolutions to support heterogeneous devices, when unequal error protection shall be used for coverage extension in wireless broadcasting, as well as for rate shaping in IPTV environments. Furthermore, it may also be useful in layered multicast transmission over the Internet or peer-to-peer networks, or in any transmission scenario where prioritized transmission for network flows is meaningful. In order to make usage of SVC in the aforementioned use cases, standards for defining the transport format and procedure are required. Therefore, we give a detailed overview of the recently finished SVC standards on transport over IP/RTP and the MPEG-2 transport stream. Both standards are important for IPTV and video on demand, where the first is important for SVC transport over mobile broadcast/multicast channels, and the latter is also important for SVC transport over traditional digital broadcast channels.     

A 0.2-mW 2-Mb/s Digital Transceiver Based on Wideband Signaling for Human Body Communications

This paper presents a low-power wideband signaling (WBS) digital transceiver for data transmission through a human body for body area network applications. The low-power and highspeed human body communication (HBC) utilizes a digital transceiver chip based on WBS and adopts a direct-coupled interface (DCI) which uses an electrode of 50-Omega impedance. The channel investigation with the DCI identities an optimum channel bandwidth of 10 kHz to 100 MHz. The WBS digital transceiver exploits a direct digital transmitter and an all-digital clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit. To further reduce power consumption, the proposed CDR circuit incorporates a low-voltage digitally-controlled oscillator and a quadratic sampling technique. The WBS digital transceiver chip with a 0.25-mum standard CMOS technology has 2-Mb/s data rate at a bit error rate of 1.1 times 10^-7, dissipating only 0.2 mW from a 1-V supply generated by a 1.5-V battery.