Abstract

The use of VoIP for carrying real-time voice data over any IP network, public or private, has significant impacts on the multi-billion dollar telecommunication industry.  Its promise on less expensive phone calls with comparable quality, as well as the proliferation of the broadband Internet, has increased its worldwide adoption.  In this talk, we present the design issues and some solutions for delivering high and consistent conversational voice communication quality (CVCQ) perceived by users in real-time VoIP systems. We identify the attributes that affect the human perception of CVCQ, which include listening-only speech quality (LOSQ), conversational symmetry (CS), and conversational efficiency (CE). We investigate their trade-offs with respect to system-controllable mouth-to-ear delays and the amount of redundant piggybacking.  We illustrate the solutions in two-party and multi-party conferencing systems and compare their performance to that in Skype, Google-Talk, Windows Live, and Yahoo Messenger.

Biography

Benjamin W. Wah is currently the Franklin W. Woeltge Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL.  He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, CA, in 1979.  Previously, he had served on the faculty of Purdue University.  In 1989, he was awarded a University Scholar of the University of Illinois; in 1998, he received the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award; in 2000, the IEEE Millennium Medal; in 2003, the Raymond T. Yeh Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Design and Process Science; in 2006, the IEEE Computer Society W. Wallace-McDowell Award and the Pan Wen-Yuan Outstanding Research Award, and in 2007, the IEEE Computer Society Richard E. Merwin Award and the IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Distributed Processing Outstanding Achievement Award.  Wah's current research interests are in the areas of nonlinear search and optimization, multimedia signal processing, and computer networks.

Wah cofounded the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering in 1988 and served as its Editor-in-Chief between 1993 and 1996, and is the Honorary Editor-in-Chief of Knowledge and Information Systems.  He currently serves on the editorial boards of Information Sciences, International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, Journal of VLSI Signal Processing, World Wide Web, and Neural Processing Letters.  He had chaired a number of international conferences, including the 2000 IFIP World Congress and the 2008 IEEE International Conferences on Distributed Computing Systems.  He has served the IEEE Computer Society in various capacities, including Vice President for Publications (1998 and 1999) and President (2001).  He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE.