Speech Quality of VoIP: Assessment and Prediction

Finally a comprehensive overview of speech quality in VoIP from the user's perspective!

Speech Quality of VoIP is an essential guide to assessing the speech quality of VoIP networks, whilst addressing the implications for the design of VoIP networks and systems. This book bridges the gap between the technical network-world and the psychoacoustic world of quality perception.  Alexander Raake’s unique perspective combines awareness of the technical characteristics of VoIP networks and original research concerning the perception of speech transmitted across them.

Starting from the network designer’s point of view, the different characteristics of the network are addressed, and then linked to features perceived by users. This book provides an overview of the available knowledge on the principal, relevant aspects of speech and speech quality perception, of speech quality assessment, and of transmission properties of telephone and VoIP networks, and of the related perceptual features and resulting speech quality. Discussing new research into the specific time-varying degradations VoIP brings along, but also the considerable potential of quality improvement to be achieved with wideband speech transmission, Alexander Raake demonstrates how network and service characteristics impact on the users perception of quality.

Speech Quality of VoIP:

• Offers an insight into speech quality of VoIP from a user's perspective.
• Presents an overview of different modelling approaches and a parametric network-planning model for quality prediction in VoIP networks.
• Draws on innovative new research on the quality degradation characteristic of VoIP.
• Explains in detail how telephone speech quality can be greatly enhanced with VoIP’s wideband speech transmission capability.
• Assesses the vast collection of references into the technical and scientific literature related to VoIP quality.
• Illustrates concepts throughout with mathematical models, algorithms and simulations.

Speech Quality of VoIP is the definitive guide for researchers, engineers and network planners working in the field of VoIP, Quality of Service, and speech communication processing in telecommunications. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students on telecommunication and networking courses will also find this text an invaluable resource.

Alexander Raake is Senior Scientist at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin. Alexander has worked in the field of VoIP quality and related topics for almost seven years. Current research topics include service personalization, user expectation and the quality and usability of VoIP-based speech transmission systems, and virtual environments for multi-party communication and multi-modal systems. Since 1999 Alexander has participated in the standardization activities of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) on transmission performance of telephone networks and terminals.