Mobile information society and DSP

The number of cellular phones sold annually exceeds that of PC's and cars together. The shift to second-generation digital cellular standards has made cellular phones the major application for digital signal processing. In the next few years the 3rd generation cellular standards will be taken in use. This will call for sophisticated DSP algorithms for the radio channel processing implemented in very high performance but low power processors. Simultaneously, it is expected that various forms of multimedia and advanced speech applications will take off. These applications will rely heavily on advanced signal processing algorithms. This presentation gives an overview of the current and future cellular technologies and highlights the expectations that this development places on both DSP algorithms and hardware.