Professional Documents
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Full HD Voice
Huawei
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.
Enterprise VoIP
Full HD Voice
2014-10-20
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Full HD Voice
Contents
Introduction ...................................................................... 4
HD Voice and the 3GPP AMR-WB Codec .............................. 4
Over the Top Conversational Codecs .................................. 6
Full HD voice and new EVS Codec for VoLTE ....................... 7
Features and Performance of the EVS Codec ....................... 8
Why Operators should deploy EVS .................................... 11
EVS impact on VoLTE ...................................................... 12
Full HD Voice proposal in GSMA ....................................... 13
Future Voice: EVS Beyond 3GPP Release 12 ...................... 15
References ...................................................................... 16
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Full HD Voice
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
improves the
call experience
over
conventional
Narrowband
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
fatigue often associated with long conference calls.
Orange R&D studies of HD voice customers confirmed: 96% of customers are
satisfied with HD voice calls [2].
The HD Voice Logo of GSMA (Global System for Mobile Communications
Association) has been successful in encouraging both operators and manufacturers
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.
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Full HD Voice
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 inplace 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
enabled mobile HD Voice services in 73 countries [3] - see Figure 2.
Currently the HD Voice Logo requirements for GSM/UMTS mandate use of AMR-WB
and those for CDMA2000 mandate the use of EVRC-NW; both of which are
wideband speech codecs (50 Hz to 7000 Hz). This is well aligned with the
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
two codecs.
one hundred
operators
worldwide
have enabled
HD Voice
services in 73
countries
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Full HD Voice
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].
The recently
standardized
Opus codec
represents a
performance
benchmark
that is hard to
ignore
2014-10-20
Over-the-top (OTT) service providers such as Skype have been providing VoIP pointto-point services for several years. The flexibility and processing power of the PC
platform combined with IP and little or no legacy infrastructure allowed the services
to shift easily from conventional NB services to WB and even SWB using proprietary
codecs such as SiLK. Broadband IP networks do not suffer the same radio resource
constraints as wide area mobile networks and so the drive for high quality at lower bit
rates is less obvious but nevertheless such services are already threatening the
capacity and revenue streams of mobile operators. Many operators attempt to control
their use by deep packet inspection or other profiling methods but smart phones
using WiFi connections can easily circumvent the mobile networks.
The recently standardized Opus codec in IETF RFC 6716 [4] represents a
performance benchmark that is hard to ignore for conventionally standardized
codecs. This codec which is a hybrid between the Skype SiLK voice codec and the
CELT audio codec spans a range in bit rate from 6 kbit/s to 510 kbit/s. At lower bit
rates performance is somewhat limited and the coded bandwidth is less than SWB.
The Opus codec may not live up to all of the claims as a totally open, royalty-free
audio codec but it represents a high quality codec at, and above, 24 kbit/s where it
codes more of the SWB bandwidth. See [5]. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, 24
kbit/s represents a rather high bit rate for efficient use of the radio resource for
speech/audio in mobile systems.
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Full HD Voice
2014-10-20
the
introduction of
new codecs is
more easily
achieved than
in the
past. fewer
changes are
required
within the
infrastructure.
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Full HD Voice
in March 2010 it was completed. This study [1] led directly to the development of the
EVS Codec which will be completed in 3Q2014.
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Full HD 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
(kbit/s)
Signal bandwidths
supported
Source Controlled
Operation Available
5.9 (SC-VBR)
NB, WB
7.2
NB, WB
Yes
NB, WB
Yes
9.6
Yes
13.2
Yes
WB, SWB
Yes
16.4
Yes
24.4
Yes
32
WB, SWB, FB
Yes
48
WB, SWB, FB
Yes
64
WB, SWB, FB
Yes
96
WB, SWB, FB
Yes
128
WB, SWB, FB
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.
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Full HD Voice
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.
Figure 3: Bandwidths of 3GPP Codecs
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.
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Full HD Voice
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)
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Full HD Voice
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 5: The EVS Codec operation in AMR-WB I/O Mode
2.
Figure 6 highlights the necessary network node changes for EVS over VoLTE.
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Full HD Voice
Application Server
RCS Server
SIP
Converged SDB
IMS Core
Diameter
H.248
H L R/HSS/ENUM/DNS
PLMN/PSTN Network
SIP
I/S-CSCF/MRFC
MRFP
MGCF
SI
P
IM-MGW
SBC (P-CSCF/ATCF/ATGW/E-CSCF)
CS
EPC
EMSC
PCRF
S-GW/P-GW
MME
MGW
2G/3G
2G/3G
LTE
LTE
VoLTE Smartphone
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.
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Full HD Voice
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.
Figure 8: Example GSMA HD Voice Logo with Tag-line.
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.
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Full HD Voice
2014-10-20
one of the
next key areas
to enhance the
perceived
audio
quality will
be binaural
rendering and
immersive
audio.
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Full HD Voice
References
[1]
[2 ]
2014-10-20
[3]
[4]
ftp://ftp.3gpp2.org/TSGAC/Working/2014/20140318_Kyoto/TSG-AC-2014-03Kyoto/WG1/14_01_20_Position/AC10-20140120-010A_HD-Voice-Annex-CMinimum-Requirements-with-GSM-UMTS.pdf
[5]
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716
[6]
http://www.opus-codec.org/
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