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Wireless Speech and Audio Communications – A Time Warp

Author:
Peter Vary
Book Title:
European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO)
Venue:
Nice, France
Event Date:
31.8.-4.9.2015
Organization:
EURASIP
Date:
Aug. 2015
Note:
Plenary talk (EURASIP Fellow Inaugural Lecture)
Language:
English

Abstract

From the TV series “Star Trek” it is known, that the “time barrier” can be broken by travelling in a spacecraft equipped with a warp drive. On the basis of the warp travel technology, the audience is taken on a faster-than-light journey back and forth through the evolution of wireless speech and audio communications.

Different landmarks will be visited on our sightseeing tour. We start about 30 years ago, and recognize how the feasibility of digital wireless speech and audio communications was proven with pioneering but bulky multi-DSP systems. These early exercises were groundwork for the forthcoming digital mobile radio system GSM.

As Moore’s law of exponential growth concerning processing speed and memory capacity was expected to be still valid for many years, the engineers were keen to invent more and more complex combinations of sophisticated signal processing and coding algorithms for mobile phones: e.g. multi-microphone speech enhancement, multi-rate speech coding, soft decision source decoding, Turbo error protection, iterative source channel decoding, and last but not least voice controlled operation.

The vision of smart phones having the computational power of the supercomputers from the eighties has become reality and exciting applications have been established. However, one astonishing insight is that despite these amazing developments, smartphones nowadays still provide a voice quality which is mostly comparable to the plain old telephone. But there is hope, the recent launch of LTE cellular networks promises new revolutionary steps towards high quality speech and audio communications on the next stage of our journey.

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