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Greater transmission capacity is coming to mobile phone networks based on Long Term Evolution (LTE), a new standard that will support greater bandwidth. Researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) in Berlin have developed Scalable Video Coding (SVC) over LTE, which will enable high definition films to be transmitted to cell phones or netbooks. The researchers are demonstrating the system this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
LTE has a higher performance capacity than the current Universal Mobile Telecommunications system (UMTS) standard, reaching download speeds that are comparable to landline broadband networks.
The “Multicore SVC Real-time Encoder” system encodes a basic version of the video, and adds several enhancement layers in the SVC bit stream in one single processing step. Partial decoding of the scalable bit stream allows graceful degradation and bit rate, format and power adaptation. LTE can now use a higher error protection to transmit the base layer. Thus, any mobile terminal can decode the basic version of the video stream, guaranteeing the transmission of video services everywhere, at a given time. Under good network conditions, the mobile user can get premium video quality by decoding additional enhancement layers.
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