The transmission of real-time images and video over wireless communication
channels is a challenging problem. Digital compressed images are sensitive
to bit errors which are typical in wireless communications. Moreover, the b
andwidth at the air interface is currently a limiting factor because the fi
rst and second generation of mobile phone standards mainly support voice co
mmunications. In this paper, we present a study of real-time image traffic
over a radio link - the aim of this research is for videophone applications
. In this study, we use the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to compress im
ages and a Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) link to transfer images ove
r wireless communications network. The experiment results indicate that it
is possible to transfer 9-12 QCIF gray scale images per second over a CDMA
link with graceful degradation in image quality.