Scanning the Issue

One hundred years after Marconi’s ground-breaking radio experiment and 50 years following Shannon’s pioneering contributions in information theory, the communications community is witnessing unprecedented growth in both the quality and quantity of communications services. While wireless communications practitioners are endeavoring to translate exciting recent developments into international standards, researchers continue scanning the horizon for new ideas and solutions in order to approach information theoretical performance predictions. Burst-by-burst adaptive turbo-coded, turbo-equalized single-carrier, multicarrier, and code division multiple access (CDMA) schemes constitute just a few examples of the potential techniques which facilitate the approach towards Shannonian predictions over wireless channels. Against a backcloth of emerging third-generation (3G) wireless personal communications standards and broadband access network standard proposals, this special issue is dedicated to a range of topical wireless multimedia and video communications aspects. The transmission of multimedia information over wireline-based links can now be considered a mature area, where a range of interactive and distributive services are offered by various providers across the globe. On the distributive wireless video scene, a range of broadcast services appeared in the past few years which were contrived for stationary applications. Specifically, in Europe a set of mutually compatible cable-, terrestrial-, and satellite-based digital video broadcasting (DVB) schemes were standardized which employ the Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG-2) standard for video compression and Reed–Solomon (RS) forward error correction (FEC). The FEC performance can be further improved upon by invoking turbo coding and iterative decoding, especially when using a high turbo interleaving depth, since the distributive multimedia environment is not delay sensitive. The more hostile propagation environment of the terrestrial DVB system is combated using concatenated RS and rate-compatible, punctured, convolutional coding (RCPCC) combined with an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based scheme. By contrast, the more benign cableand satellite-based media facilitate the employment