Implementing an application for communication and quality measurements over UMTS networks

Abstract: The interest for various multimedia services accessed via the Internet has been growing immensely along with the bandwidth available. A similar development has emerged in the 3G mobile network. The focus of this master thesis is on the speech/audio part of a 3G multimedia application. The purpose has been to implement a traffic generating tool that can measure QoS (Quality of Service) in 3G networks. The application is compliant to the 3G standards, i.e. it uses AMR (Adaptive Multi Rate), SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and RTP (Real Time Transport Protocol). AMR is a speech compression algorithm with the special feature that it can compress speech into several different bitrates. SIP signalling is used so that different applications can agree on how to communicate. RTP carries the speech frames over the network, in order to provide features that are necessary for media/multimedia applications. Issues like perception of audio and QoS related parameters is also discussed, from the perspective of users and developers.