This thesis describes several concepts associated with the transmission of multimedia services over mobile radio access networks. The error performance and traffic requirements of real-time video transmission over the General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) access network and its successor Enhanced-GPRS is examined. In view of this. video error resilience techniques which exploit channel prioritisation mechanisms are introduced with a view to increasing the robustness of received video sequences encoded with MPEG-4 to channel errors. These include stream prioritisation using unequal error protection and region-of-interest prioritisation for use in multiparty communications and streaming applications. A new forward-error correction scheme for EGPRS which uses iterative serially-concatenated convolutional-Reed Solomon codes is designed and is shown to significantly enhance the error performance for real-time services. A study of (he use of backward error correction mechanisms when transmitting streaming multimedia services is carried out, and a new retransmission scheme is introduced to increase the capacity of the radio access network when supporting streaming services