Radio group aims for quality

Recent work in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering has focused on systems that can be used to transmit high-quality video information over mobile radio channels.

The aim is to achieve a picture quality comparable to that in a domestic digital television receiver. Such broadcast- quality video transmission is impossible to achieve in present-day mobile radio systems due to the restricted amount of information these can carry. Techniques developed in the Advanced Integrated Mobile Systems (AIMS) Group form part of the Telecommunications Research Centre in the Department, and some of the recent work in this group uses a high-level modulation technique called quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). QAM enables the information-carrying capacity of existing mobile radio channels to be increased by, in our case, up to a factor of eight.

Although the use of QAM to increase information-carrying capacity is well known, in the past its drawback has been its vulnerability to a type of disruption called multipath interference. This is very prevalent in mobile communication systems and is caused by the signal being reflected from buildings and moving vehicles. The novelty in the approach taken by the AIMS Group is in the techniques used to combat this multipath interference and nullify its effect. The results have been exceptionally successful and computer simulations have demonstrated that high-quality video transmissions over present mobile communication systems are a very real possibility.

Applications range from the domestic to potentially life-saving medical ones. These techniques could, for example, be used to remotely monitor domestic premises from almost any part of the country using nothing more than a mobile phone with a small video window. A medical application might be to transmit high-definition medical images of a seriously injured patient from ambulance to hospital while en route to the latter. This could enable a team of surgeons to know exactly what to expect on the patient's arrival.

The work is supervised by Professor Mike Woodward, and is supported by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant.

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University - Public Relations - Annual Reports - 2000 Contents - Research

University of Bradford, Bradford, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom

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