| Mobile multimedia communication is increasingly in demand because of the basic need to communicate at any time, anywhere, using any technology. In addition, to voice communication, people have a desire to access a range of other services that comprise multimedia elements—text, image, animation, high fidelity audio and video using mobile communication networks. To meet these demands, mobile communication technologies has evolved from analog to digital, and the networks have passed through a number of generations from first generation (1G) to fourth generation (4G).
Chapter I provides a brief description of the different generations of mobile communication networks including their standards, major services, and transmission rates. The characteristics of 4G from a users’ point of view, as well as its major research challenges in terms of mobile terminals, network system, and mobile services will also be presented in this chapter.
With the rapid development of mobile communication systems, demands for the transmission of multimedia information using portable devices are increasing day by day. Chapter II demonstrates the effectiveness of transport layer handoff schemes for multimedia transmission, and is compared with that achieved by mobile Internet protocol (IP).
Understating the parameters that determine the suitability of a communication standard for the transmission of multimedia information for a particular application is of paramount importance for mobile system designers, users, and researchers. Chapter III describes multimedia applications needing the services of mobile network systems, and presents the fundamentals of issues involved in the delivery of multimedia content with the desired quality of service (QoS). Current and future challenges in achieving successful mobile multimedia information transmission are also discussed.
The personalized communication system is gaining more importance with an increase of communication ways due to the social reform by the technological advancement. Chapter IV introduces a personalized system for device independent and position aware communication, which is secure, scalable, and an open architecture. This chapter also presents the further research in this field.
The application of multimedia information in treatment or medical diagnosis using portable devices is proliferating with the development of mobile multimedia communication. Chapter V provides an overview of the existing therapy methods based on paper materials and mobile electronic devices in the current literature, and proposes the software solutions for the patients, the careers, and the professional speech and language therapists (SLTs), which could be accessible by mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDA). Finally, the recommendations for the direction of future research and development are made in this chapter. |
