Management of Speech and Video Telephony Quality in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Book excerpt: This book shows how networking research and quality engineering can be combined to successfully manage the transmission quality when speech and video telephony is delivered in heterogeneous wireless networks. Nomadic use of services requires intelligent management of ongoing transmission, and to make the best of available resources many fundamental trade-offs must be considered. Network coverage versus throughput and reliability of a connection is one key aspect, efficiency versus robustness of signal compression is another. However, to successfully manage services, user-perceived Quality of Experience (QoE) in heterogeneous networks must be known, and the perception of quality changes must be understood. These issues are addressed in this book, in particular focusing on the perception of quality changes due to switching between diverse networks, speech and video codecs, and encoding bit rates during active calls.