This glossary presents the usual acronyms and terminology used in communication and digital television standards (Alencar, 1999, 2002a, 2007b, Furiati, 1998, Design, 2001, Skycell, 2001, Mobile Word, 2001 and TIAB2B.com, 2001).

A

ADPCM

Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation. ADPCM is a speech coding method that achieves bit rate reduction through the use of adaptive prediction and adaptive quantization.

ADSL

Assymetric Digital Subscriber Line.

ADVEF

Advanced television Enhancement Forum.

A/D

Analog-to-Digital converter or conversion.

AES

Audio Engineering Society.

AF

Audio Frequency. The band of frequencies (approximately 20 Hz 20 kHz) that, when transmitted as acoustic waves, can be heard by the normal human ear.

AGC

Automatic Gain Control.

AM

Amplitude Modulation.

AM-SC

Amplitude Modulation Suppressed Carrier.

AM-VSB

AM Vestigial Sideband Modulation. Classical method used to modulate carriers in traditional analog video.

AMPS

Advanced Mobile Phone Service. The first-generation analog cellular phone system that originated in the USA.

ANSI

American National Standards Institute. This is a US-based organization which develops standards and defines interfaces for telecommunications.

ARQ

Automatic ReQuest for retransmission. A type of communications link in which the receiver asks the transmitter to resend a block of data when errors are detected.

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII data are standard seven-bit code with one parity bit. Otherwise referred to as text. ASCII data can be interchanged between almost every type of computer.

ASIC

Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.

ASK

Amplitude Shift Keying.

ATM

Asynchronous...