A New Application-Aware No-Reference Quality Assessment Method for IP Voice Services

Abstract

The increasing number of Voice over LTE deployments and IP-based voice services raise the demand for their user-centric service quality monitoring. This domain’s leading challenge is measuring user experience quality reliably without performing subjective assessments or applying the standard full-reference objective models. While the former is time- and resource-consuming and primarily executed ad-hoc, the latter depends upon a reference source and processes the voice payload that may offend user privacy. This paper presents a packet-level measurement method (introducing a novel metric set) to objectively assess network and service quality online. It is accomplished without inspecting the voice payload and needing the reference voice sample. The proposal has three contributions: (i) our method focuses on the timeliness of the media traffic. It introduces new performance metrics that describe and measure the service’s time-domain behavior from the voice application viewpoint. (ii) Based on the proposed metrics, we also present a no-reference Quality of Experience (QoE) estimation model. (iii) Additionally, we propose a new method to identify the pace of the speech (slow or dynamic) as long as voice activity detection (VAD) is present between the endpoints. This identification supports the introduced quality model to estimate the perceived quality with higher accuracy. The performance of the proposed model is validated against a full-reference voice quality estimation model called AQuA, using real VoIP traffic (originated in assorted voice samples) in controlled transmission scenarios.