Subband speech coding and matched convolutional channel coding for mobile radio channels

The effects of digital transmission errors on a family of variable-rate embedded subband speech coders (SBC) are analyzed in detail. It is shown that there is a difference in error sensitivity of four orders of magnitude between the most and the least sensitive bits of the speech coder. As a result, a family of rate-compatible punctured convolutional codes with flexible unequal error protection capabilities have been matched to the speech coder. These codes are optimally decoded with the Viterbi algorithm. Among the results, analysis and informal listening tests show that with a 4-level unequal error protection scheme transmission of 12 kb/s speech is possible with very little degradation in quality over a 16 kb/s channel with an average bit error rate (BER) of 2×10^-2 at a vehicle speed of 60 m.p.h. and with interleaving over two 16 ms speech frames