Voice Conferencing Technology Program.
Abstract
The goal of this research on voice conferencing technology has been to recommend and demonstrate the best secure voice conferencing techniques for future defense communication needs. The focus was on the human factors aspects of conferencing. Analysis also was made of the conferencing process itself and of the various proposed system configurations. The following are among the study's conclusions: (1) Requirement to accommodate narrowband users in military conferences necessitates use of some signal selection technique instead of the conventional signal summation (bridging) technique; (2) While summation with analog or wideband PCM signals is superior to any signal selection technique investigated, use of any of the better signal selection techniques with the same wideband encoding would not result in significant loss of conferencing capability; (3) Speech quality (voice encoding technique) has a larger effect on subjective judgements of system acceptability than do conferencing protocol (simplex broadcast, speaker/interrupter, etc.) or control techniques (voice control, push-to-talk, etc.); (4) Implementation details, such as the operation of speech activity detectors and procedures for handling collisions in a shared-channel distributed-control system, also have a greater effect on acceptability than protocols or control techniques which involve much larger conceptual issues and cost considerations, and (5) The two most important aspects of conferencing over which a system designer has some control are the ability of the system to handle collisions and the extent to which a speaker may be arbitrarily interrupted.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 31, 1979
- Accession Number
- ADA074498
Entities
People
- C. E. Feehrer
- James W. Forgie
- P. L. Weene
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology