David J. Atkinson

Abstract: In an extended P25/VoLTE public safety communication system voice signals will pass through both Multi-Band Excitation (MBE) and Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) speech coders. Thus it is important to quantify the speech quality that can be expected for MBE, AMR, and combinations of these speech coders. We used the Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) algorithm to provide initial assessments of speech quality for these coders alone and in combinations. This document contains requirements for an interoperable public safety broadband communications nationwide network to serve all local, tribal, state, and federal first responder communications.

Keywords: objective estimation of speech quality; speech quality; Project 25 (P25); AMBE; AMBEoLTE; PESQ; VoLTE; P25/VoLTE interconnection

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