Speech Quality Evaluation and Benchmarking in Cellular Mobile Networks

Speech quality is still and will be a major performance indicator for end-to-end QoS in (cellular) mobile telecommunication networks. Therefore, it is crucial to measure and to evaluate the behavior of speech quality in live networks either via commonly applied drive-tests or other kind of field trials. The evaluation of the measurement data is a key element in order to obtain representative and consistent results. We provide an overview of current techniques to evaluate and benchmark speech quality services, incorporating the current attempt from ETSI to evaluate speech quality per call. We show the deviations that occur when using different approaches to evaluate speech quality measurement data and conclude with a recommendation on how to efficiently design evaluations for comparative QoS benchmarks.