Page 24 - Video Coding for Mobile Communications Efficiency, Complexity, and Resilience

Chapter 1

Introduction to Mobile

Video Communications

1.1 Motivations and Applications

In recent years, two distinct technologies have experienced massive growth
and commercial success: multimedia and mobile communications. With the
increasing reliance on the availability of multimedia information and the in-
creasing mobility of individuals, there is a great need for providing multimedia
information on the move. Motivated by this vision of being able to commu-
nicate from anywhere at any time with any type of information, a natural
convergence of mobile and multimedia is under way. This new area is called
mobile multimedia communications.
Mobile multimedia communications is expected to achieve unprecedented
growth and worldwide success. For example, in Western Europe alone, it is
estimated that by the year 2005 about 32 million people will use mobile multi-
media services, representing a market segment worth 24 billion Euros per year
and generating 3;800 million Mbytes of tra(c per month. This will corre-
spond, respectively, to 16% of all mobile users, 23% of the total revenues, and
60% of the overall tra(c. Usage is expected to increase at even higher rates,
with 35% of all mobile users having mobile multimedia services by the year
2010 [1]. The estimates become even more impressive when put in the context
of a worldwide mobile market that reached 331:5 million users by the end of
June 2000 [2] and is expected to grow to 1:7 billion users by 2010 [1]. It is
not surprising, therefore, that this area has become an active and important
research and development topic for both industry and academia, with groups
across the world working to develop future mobile multimedia systems.
The de1nition of the term multimedia has always been a source of great
debate and confusion. In this book, it refers to the presentation of information
through multiple forms of media. This includes textual media (text, style,

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