Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Full HD Voice
Huawei “Just like speaking face to face”….
Enterprise VoIP
October 2014 Full High Definition voice, refers to the next generation of voice quality for
telephony audio resulting in crystal clear voice quality compared to digital
telephony "toll quality" and even to HD voice. Full HD Voice extends the
frequency range of audio signals up to 20000 Hz which covers the whole range
of the human voice and that of the human ear.
The EVS Codec is also able to compete directly in over-the-top VoIP applications
with codecs such as the recently introduced OPUS. Both fixed point and floating
point versions of EVS make it suitable for low power devices and PC’s.
This document first presents the services and features of existing 3GPP
Wideband Codec (AMR-WB) and describes the current HD Voice Logo. Over the
top codecs such as OPUS are described and then the performance and features
of the EVS Codec are examined. Finally we examine a new Full HD Voice Logo.
and immersive sound experience for future.
Full HD Voice
Contents
Introduction ...................................................................... 4
References ...................................................................... 16
Introduction
In March 2010 3GPP completed a study item on use-cases for Enhanced Voice
Services (EVS) over the Evolved Packet System of LTE. This study [1] led directly to
the development of the EVS Codec was completed in 3Q2014. After a competitive
qualification phase, a consortium of all of the qualified codec developers, including
Huawei Technologies, was formed and the Selection phase became a collaborative
development.
This document first presents the services and features of existing 3GPP and over the
top codecs and describes the current HD Voice Logo. Then performance and
features of the EVS Codec are examined. Finally we examine a new Full HD Voice
Logo and opportunities for Huawei to lead in the deployment of the EVS Codec.
HD voice helps operators to differentiate their voice service offerings and enables
high quality services e.g. voice dependent business like call centers, information and
emergency services, etc. HD voice is much better for conference calls and can
contribute to a reduction in business travel - raising productivity while reducing
environmental impact. Calls which are easier to hear and understand reduce the
HD voice fatigue often associated with long conference calls.
improves the Orange R&D studies of HD voice customers confirmed: 96% of customers are
call experience satisfied with HD voice calls [2].
over
The HD Voice Logo of GSMA (Global System for Mobile Communications
conventional Association) has been successful in encouraging both operators and manufacturers
Narrowband to provide AMR-WB and EVRC-NW based services.
Both the 3GPP AMR-WB and the 3GPP2 EVRC-NW codecs are essentially speech
codecs. A degree of performance for music signals at the higher bit rates of
operation is achieved but these codec have not been designed to provide other than
tolerable rendering.
Initially take-up of the AMR-WB codec and wideband speech services was slow,
partially due to the need for either tandem-free operation (TFO) or transcoder-free
operation (TrFO) to be available in the network, but once these innovations were in-
place the service started to take off.
There are currently many well established operators and major manufacturers signed
up as licensees of the HD Voice Logo - see Figure 1 and the Global Mobile Suppliers
Association announced in March 2014 that one hundred operators worldwide have
…one hundred
enabled mobile HD Voice services in 73 countries [3] - see Figure 2. operators
worldwide
Currently the HD Voice Logo requirements for GSM/UMTS mandate use of AMR-WB have enabled
and those for CDMA2000 mandate the use of EVRC-NW; both of which are
HD Voice
wideband speech codecs (50 Hz to 7000 Hz). This is well aligned with the
services in 73
conventional definition of “HD Voice”, which is synonymous with wideband speech
services (50 Hz to 7000 Hz); matching as it does the frequency response of these
countries
two codecs.
文档名称 文档密级
HD Voice Manufacturer Licensees
The group that is responsible for developing the HD Voice Logo Requirements within
GSMA, TSG VLR, is in the process of determining priorities for version 3.0; version
2.0 was approved in 2013 [3].
Full HD voice will provide additional means for operators to differentiate their voice
service offerings and enable even higher quality services. The additional error
robustness of Full HD Voice will also mean that these higher quality services are
provided over more of the coverage area of an operator’s network; increasing the
satisfaction level of end-users.
The features of Full HD Voice cannot be provided using existing speech and audio
codecs and therefore a new codec is clearly needed. The AMR-WB codec was
completed by 3GPP in 2001 and since that time codec technology has developed
significantly. Codecs such as the 3GPP2 VMR Codec, ITU-T G.718 and 3GPP AMR-
WB+ have built upon the best features of AMR-WB and been shown to provide
enhanced performance in poor radio channels and better quality for music signals.
Over the same period codecs have been developed that encode more and more of
the audio spectrum. Codecs such as ITU-T G.719, and Superwideband extensions to
codecs such as ITU-T G.718 and G.729.1 have demonstrated that the additional
audio bandwidths above 7kHz do not require very much extra data to encode well. …the
introduction of
There have also been significant developments in Mobile System infrastructure. With new codecs is
the deployment of the Internet Protocol (IP) based infrastructure known as IMS, in
more easily
conjunction with LTE which is also a packet-based air interface technology, the
achieved than
introduction of new codecs is also much more easily achieved than in the past. This
is because fewer changes are required within the infrastructure to support the new in the
codecs as the data packets can remain in-tact from one handset to the other in a call. past…. …fewer
The transmission of voice packets over the LTE air interface is known as Voice over changes are
LTE (VoLTE) to mirror the similarity to VoIP. VoLTE is currently being rolled out in required
Korea with more general deployment later in the year and throughout 2014. within the
infrastructure.
In response to these developments a study item on use-cases for Enhanced Voice
Services (EVS) over the Evolved Packet System of LTE was initiated in 3GPP; and
in March 2010 it was completed. This study [1] led directly to the development of the
EVS Codec which will be completed in 3Q2014.
The 3GPP Work Item Description for the EVS Codec which will be completed during
2014 lists the objectives of the new codec as follows;
1. Enhanced quality and coding efficiency for narrowband (NB) and wideband
(WB) speech services, leading to improved user experience and system efficiency.
This should also be achieved in interoperation with pre-Rel-10 systems and services
employing WB voice.
will provide improvements to the Wideband speech services that are at the heart of
the HD Voice Logo Terminal Requirements (WID Items 1, 3, 4 & 5).
Perhaps the main enhancement to voice services provided by EVS though will be
SWB speech (and in-call music - WID Item 2 in combination with Items 3 & 4) which
obviously goes beyond the wideband frequencies up to 7kHz and covers frequencies
up to at least 14kHz. In-fact the current frequency masks used within the EVS
standardization exercise extend beyond 15000 Hz at certain bitrates. The Fullband
audio mode of EVS operating from 16.4 kbit/s will also provide even greater
improvement. As mentioned previously, it will be these broader audio bandwidths
which will define Full HD Voice.
Table 1: Source codec bit-rates for the EVS codec (from draft TS 26.441)
Source codec bit-rate Signal bandwidths Source Controlled
(kbit/s) supported Operation Available
5.9 (SC-VBR) NB, WB Yes (Always On)
8 NB, WB Yes
There have been conversational SWB and FB codecs before in both ITU-T and VoIP
applications such as Skype but the EVS Codec achieves with SWB coding from 9.6
kbit/s and FB coding from 16.4 kbit/s as shown in Table 1. The SWB coding of EVS
comes close to achieving the quality and reproducing the bandwidth of broadcast FM
radio. Fullband coding comes close to HiFi bandwidths and systems such as MP3.
See Figure 3.
From a quality perspective, the EVS codec provides this unrivalled quality for not
only clean speech but noisy speech and music/audio across the entire bit rate range;
but particularly at bit rates up to 24.4 kbit/s. This, combined with better capacity and
excellent robustness to frame erasures, makes the EVS codec supremely adapted to
mobile applications.
The EVS codec also has an example solution of a jitter buffer manager (JBM) which
evens out the packet delay variation experienced by speech data packets
transported over the IMS which is a voice over IP (VoIP) system.
The quality of the EVS codec operating in its SWB modes can be seen in Figure 4.
This figure shows the performance of the codec in clean speech (Figure 4a), clean
speech with frame losses (Figure 4b), noisy speech (Figure 4c) and music/mixed
content (Figure 4d). The tests were performed as part of the independent evaluation
of the codec in the EVS Selection Phase.
In almost all cases the EVS Codec is superior to the reference codecs used to define
the requirements – Note in Figure 4d the reference codecs although operating at the
same bit rate have significant longer delays making them unsuitable for
conversational applications. Similar performance against the references is achieved
in NB and WB.
This level of performance exceeds that of all existing 3GPP codecs and in particular
the AMR-WB codec which led to the creation of the GSMA HD Voice Logo – after all
HD Voice is synonymous with Wideband audio.
Figure 4: Quality of The EVS Codec operating in SWB (Selection test results)
Competition from OTT services such as Skype has been naturally limited by the
universal addressing provided by the unique address space represented by ITU-T
E.164 and yet they have flourished due to enhanced audio quality and lower cost.
EVS provides a real opportunity for mobile operators to devalue the proposition of
these OTT providers by offering a highly competitive audio quality package to both to
consumers and business/enterprise customers, in addition to the addressing
convenience.
In addition to the EVS primary modes, the codec has modes that allow it to
interoperate with the 3GPP AMR-WB codec and achieve enhanced quality and
robustness to packet loss (see Figure 5). This feature allows EVS enabled phones to
communicate directly with AMR-WB VoLTE phones and 2G/3G phones and gives
operators flexibility to roll-out VoLTE handsets featuring the EVS codec as an
alternative to AMR-WB. During this initial phase of EVS deployment operators will
also benefit from enhanced performance of their AMR-WB service.
Figure 6 highlights the necessary network node changes for EVS over VoLTE.
SIP
Converged SDB IMS Core
Diameter
H.248
SIP PLMN/PSTN Network
I/S-CSCF/MRFC MGCF
H L R/HSS/ENUM/DNS
MRFP SI IM-MGW
P
SBC (P-CSCF/ATCF/ATGW/E-CSCF)
CS
EMSC EPC
2G/3G 2G/3G
LTE LTE
The group that is responsible for developing the HD Voice Logo Requirements within
GSMA, TSG VLR, is in the process of determining priorities for version 3.0; version
2.0 was approved in 2013. The timescales for version 3.0 are well aligned with
Release 12 completion of the EVS Codec standard and the Huawei Media Lab has
been actively working within TSG VLR to encourage the development of a new
enhancement to the HD Voice Logo to promote the deployment of SWB services with
the EVS Codec.
Figure 7: Example New Logos proposed for SWB and FB variants of the HD Voice
Logo in GSMA.
The rationale for a new Logo is that the existing Logo is very well adapted to WB
speech services provided by AMR-WB but the significant improvements in user
experience enabled by EVS go far beyond this. Good progress toward this goal has
been made and there is good support for the initiative within the TSG VLR group.
The marketing and project management groups within GSMA are now considering
the proposal.
The proposal made and accepted by TSG VLR was not to employ a completely new
logo but to build on the success of the original logo by creating a slightly modified
logo as shown in Figure 7. As an alternative it has been suggested that a tag-line
beneath the current logo may also be considered as shown in Figure 8.
References
[1] 3GPP TR 22.813 – “Study of Use Cases and requirements for enhanced
voice codecs for the EPS”, v.10.0.0, March 2010.
[2 ] http://www.gsacom.com/downloads/pdf/GSA_mobile_hd_voice_020614.php4,
June 2014.
[4] ftp://ftp.3gpp2.org/TSGAC/Working/2014/20140318_Kyoto/TSG-AC-2014-03-
Kyoto/WG1/14_01_20_Position/AC10-20140120-010A_HD-Voice-Annex-C-
Minimum-Requirements-with-GSM-UMTS.pdf
[5] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716
[6] http://www.opus-codec.org/