QoE Estimation Method for Interconnected VoIP Networks Employing Different Codecs

Abstract

VoIP is one of the key technologies for recent telecommunication services. In addition to the migration from the conventional PSTN to IP networks, mobile networks will follow the PSTN in moving to an IP-based infrastructure. Due to limited radio resources, the speech bitrate in mobile networks must be more strongly compressed than is true in PSTN. This will lead to a heterogeneous network environment, in which different speech codecs are employed in fixed and mobile networks. Therefore, from the viewpoint of designing and managing the QoE (Quality of Experience) of end-to-end telephony services, establishing a method to evaluate the quality of VoIP in such a heterogeneous network environment is very important. The quality of speech communication services should be discussed in subjective terms. Subjective quality assessment is time-consuming and expensive, however, so objective quality assessment which estimates subjective quality without carrying out subjective quality experiments is desirable. To establish an objective method to evaluate the end-to-end quality of speech in a heterogeneous network environment, this paper proposes a method for estimating the end-to-end listening quality based on the quality in each individual segment. This method is very important because conventional technologies such as the E-model, which was standardized as ITU-T Recommendation G.107, cannot accurately estimate overall quality based on segmental qualities. The experimentals show that the proposed method offers better performance in terms of quality estimation than the conventional method.