2010, 12th International Conference on Optimization of Electrical and Electronic Equipment, OPTIM 2010
Voice Quality Degradation Recognition Using the
Call Lengths
Zoltan Gaspar, Izabella Gocza
Computer Science Departament, Transilvania University
gaspar@vega.unitbv.ro gocza@vega.unitbv.ro
Abstract - This paper presents two statistical methods for
determining a voice quality degradation event that relies on
call duration analysis, approach that is suitable for large call
volume systems with little processing power requirements.
For the analysis we used real life data (460000 calls) and 387
customer complaints from a prepaid long distance provider.
We are showing that, on average, more than 80% of the
voice quality degradation events that lead to customer
complaints can be identified in real time using our tests.
I. INTRODUCTION
The public switched telephone network (PSTN) gives
a high level of reliability and conversational quality to its
users [1, 3] attributes achieved by the dedicated network it
uses. Unlike PSTN, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
has a lower reliability [1] due to the best effort nature of
the Internet. On the other side, the Internet enabled a
quick and easy interconnect for the VoIP carriers that
made possible the existence of a large number of carriers
and providers with a greater number of interconnects
between them. The quick expansion of VoIP also
introduced equipment and bandwidth dimensioning
problems resulting in fluctuating delays and packet losses,
factors that lower the voice quality of the phone calls.
For many telephony applications voice quality
monitoring is required to determine in (near) real-time if a
voice quality degradation event has occurred. The existing
objective voice quality assessment solutions are voice
stream analysis (intrusive and non-intrusive) algorithms,
with their main drawback being the processing power
they require, as presented in section II. In section III, we
present the call length distribution and determine an
analytical model for it. Sections IV and V describe the
two new test-methods and we present our conclusions in
section VI.
II. CURRENT METHODS
The methods currently used for voice quality
assessment can be divided into subjective and objective
ones.
A. Subjective measurements
Historically, the first developed method for quality
evaluation was a subjective one, defined by the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T)
recommendation P.800, which introduced the Absolute
978-1-4244-7020-4/10/$26.00 '2010 IEEE
Category Rating (ACR) test method. The ACR gives
scores from 5 (excellent) to 1 (bad). Because of the
telecommunication environment, testing is done without a
comparison to an undistorted reference. This copes with a
typical situation of a phone call, where the listener has no
access to a comparison with a reference, for example the
original voice of the other party. However this test can be
regarded as comparison of a test signal and a reference “in
the mind” of the listener, because the listener is very
familiar with the natural sound of human voice; he/she
can compare the test signal with his/her representation of
voice. The testing procedure is: a number of 20 to 50 test
subjects will be presented with an identical series of
speech fragments. Every test subject is asked to score
each sample using ACR. After statistically processing
individual results, a mean opinion score (MOS) can be
calculated.
B. OBJECTIVE MEASUREMENTS
Objective quality evaluation followed from the need
of computer automation of these tests, and two categories
of methods were developed: intrusive and non-intrusive.
1. INTRUSIVE OBJECTIVE MEASUREMENT
Intrusive measurements for voice quality like PSQM,
PESQ[4] and PEAQ[5] for audio quality, per definition
use two input signals for the quality evaluation. This is
the undistorted original signal and the degraded signal.
The MOS score is estimated based on a weighted sum of
differences between the two signals. The most successful
intrusive algorithms rely on psychoacoustic models which
emulate the human hearing process and measure the
differences between the reference and test signal on a
perceptual basis.
In order to use intrusive measurement, a VoIP
provider needs to have access to the distorted signal,
situation which can be rarely achieved in a real world
deployment, due to difficulties of mounting equipment at
the client end.
2. INTRUSIVE OBJECTIVE MEASUREMENT
In non-intrusive measurements, like the one defined
in ITU-T recommendation P. 563[6], only the degraded
voice stream is used for the MOS estimation.
Measurements following this approach are typically built
on general models of the human vocal tract to model
speech generation as well as psychoacoustic models to
simulate the human hearing process.
1034
 The processing power requirements for non-intrusive
measurement are hundreds of MFLOPS for each 8 second
input file [7]. This factor limits its usability to lab
environments, making it too costly for a medium or large
size deployment due to equipment and license fees.
III. STATISTICAL ASSESSMENT OF VOICE QUALITY
A study regarding the correlation of call lengths and
MOS score was made in [2], and came to the conclusion
that in the low to medium quality range (MOS scores
between 1 and 3) the call duration increases with
increasing speech quality. This can be explained by the
fact that when the connection quality is bad, customers
usually hang up and call again, increasing the percentage
of short calls.
We can build the call lengths distribution (CLD) by
computing the relative frequency of the call durations.
Based on the number of calls used when building the
CLD, we can define a distribution built on recent calls
(near real time evaluation on short term) and a
distribution built on call data acquired in a long term-
presented in fig.1.
CLDS short term call length distribution
CLDL long term call length distribution
time better than the exponential distribution when
applying the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) goodness-of-fit
test to an empirically obtained sample. In ITC 15 Chlebus
[12] used the Anderson-Darling (A-D) test to show that
call duration in mobile telephony follows the same
patterns as shown by Bolotin [11] for fixed telephony, as
could be expected. In order to determine the
characteristics of the mean value, without introducing a
significant amount of error, we will consider for the call
length distribution, f(x,λ), an exponential expression as:
f ( x, λ ) = λe − λx for x, λ ≥ 0 (1)
λ – rate parameter of the exponential distribution
x – random variable representing the call length
The computation of the mean value, taking k number
of samples, is expressed by:
1 k
μ= ∑
k i =1
λ e − λx (2)
It is also known that the sum of k independent and
identical (same λ) exponentially distributed random
variables is the Erlang distribution (a special case of the
Gamma distribution, with k integer) expressed by:

λk x k −1e − λx
0.25 f ( x, k , λ ) = for x, λ ≥ 0 (3)
(k − 1)!
Long term CLD
0.2 Short term CLD 1
Short term CLD 2 Based on the Central Limit Theorem, we can state that
for a sufficiently large k the Erlang (Gamma) distribution
probability

0.15
converges to Gaussian distribution with:

0.1
k
μ= (4)
0.05
λ
and variance:
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
k
call length [15s]
σ2 = (5)
Figure 1. Call lengths distribution: ‘Long term CLD’ is built on call data λ2
acquired in a long term while the other two are built on recent calls,
‘Short term CLD 2’ is considered better than ‘Short term CLD 1’,
having a distribution similar to the long term CLD. From formula (4) and formula (5), the mean of k
samples will be a normal distribution with the mean value
A. DISTRIBUTION OF THE CLD MEAN of
Several studies were made trying to identify the
distribution family of the call lengths. Willinger W. et al 1
argue that the distribution is exponential [4]. For wireless μ= (6)
channel holding times Jedrzycki C. et al. [5] and Barcelo λ
F. et al. [10] shows that the log-normal distribution is a
better fit. In his work in ITC 14 Bolotin [11] mentioned and variance
several papers appearing in ITC 13 which assumed an
exponentially distributed call length. The authors showed,
however, that mixtures of lognormals fit the call holding

1035
 1 where l is then number of short term periods in the
σ2 = (7) long term period.
kλ2
So in our formula the σμS becomes σL (the standard
From this result, we can compute the accuracy gain by deviation of the CLDL), calculated using the mean values
using a larger number of calls in calculating the average of the CLDS:
1 n
σ1
1
k1λ2 k2 (8)
σ L (= σ μ ) =
S ∑
n i =0
(μSi − μL )2 (16)
= =
σ2 1 k1 where n is the number of call lengths for the short
k 2λ2 term average calculation.

Ex. to have a reduction of 50% for the value of sigma The number of calls for the long term statistic (n) is
we need to use 4 times more call samples. determined by the number of calls in a long period of time
In the following sections we will analyze separately (4 months in our case). This number (n) can be considered
the case where k is large and the case where k is small. random but large enough to make the Central Limit
Theorem assumption.
IV. TESTS USING LARGE SAMPLE NUMBER (K LARGE) The assessment of the difference between the two
means can be done using the Z test given in our case by:
First we will analyze the case where the number of (μS − μ L )
Z= (17)
samples is large and we can make the normality σL
assumption for the sample mean, in our case the call
length average. Testing for a statistically significant Because μs is considered normally distributed, Z has a
difference between the short and long term call length standard normal distribution (μ=0, σ=1) as shown in Fig.
average can be done using the statistical Z test. 2. Our H0 hypothesis is true if the Z value is less than a
A. THE Z TEST critical Z value ( Zcritical ) for which we can define a
The general form of testing a hypothesis is: critical value (α) of our test. α is defined as the cumulative
H 0 : μ < μ0 Null hypothesis (9) distribution function value of the standard normal
distribution (CDFSN) with Zcritical as its argument. It
H1 : μ ≥ μ 0 Alternate hypothesis (10) represents a measure of how confident we want to be, we
if μX (the sample mean of an X CLD distribution) is do not reject our hypothesis in the 100(1- α)% confidence
normally distributed and σμX is the standard deviation of interval, which denotes a significance level of 100 α%.
μX , the general formula of the Z-test is given by: α = CDFSN ( Z critical ) (18)
Z X = ( μ X − μ0 ) / σ μ X (11)
If Zx is smaller than the critical value (Zx<Zcrit), we
will state that we cannot reject the test hypothesis (H0)
based on the evidence data.
Our test hypothesis is:
H 0 : μS < μL (12)
where
1 n
μL = ∑ CDi - sample mean for the CLDL
n i =1
(13)

1 k
μ S = ∑ CDi - sample mean for the CLDS (14)
k i=1
We consider the X distribution being the CLDS, so we
have to define the standard deviation of the mean value of
Figure 2. The standard normal distribution. ZCRITICAL represents the
the CLDS. But a long term period is built of more short- value for which the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the
term periods, and calculating the sample mean of these standard normal distribution is α
periods (μS), we can state that:
Looking up our calculated Z in the standard normal
1 l
μL = ⋅ ∑ μSi (μL is the sample mean of μS) (15) distribution table shows us the probability of seeing this
l i =0

1036
(or even a more extreme) difference compared to the 35

percentage of positive detection

critical value. 30
20 calls
30 calls
B. SIMULATION ANALYSIS 25 40 calls
In order to determine if there is degradation in the 20
voice quality, our method assesses the difference between
15
the mean value of the CLDS and CLDL. The statistically
10
significant decrease of the mean value of CLDS shows a
low MOS value for the recent calls. 5

In our simulation we used real life call data together 0

0.5 0.8 0.9 0.95 0.98 0.99 0.995 0.998 0.999
with customer complaint reports from a prepaid long confidence interval (1-α)
distance provider. For computing the CLDL , we chose an
interval of four months from May 2007 to August 2007. Fig. 4 The percentage of confirmed detection events from all
detection events. The higher the number of calls used for the
During this period there were 460000 answered calls and computation of the average call length, the higher the percentage of
the customer service department received a number of positive detection.
387 complaints from the customers. The CLDS data are
taken from the same period, but only a number of 20, 30 2.
the ratio between confirmed events and total
or 40 consecutive answered calls are taken into events, called percentage of positive
consideration and we define the sample period as the time detection (Figure 4).
from the first to the last call. C. COMPLEXITY ANALYSIS
When our test confirmed a significant statistical The pseudo-code of the algorithm can be seen in
difference between μS and μL for a specific confidence Fig.5. The long time average value and standard deviation
interval, we called it a detection event. When, in the computation are not inside any loop, so although they are
corresponding sample period we found a complaint from database intensive operations they can be considered as
at least one customer to the specific destination, we called running in constant time. It is the nature of these values to
that quality degradation event confirmed, otherwise we change infrequently, so the results can be saved in a
called it unconfirmed. If a customer experienced a poor database and read therein without the need to re-compute
voice quality call, he/she would not always call right them.
away to the customer service. For this reason we added a The time complexity of the algorithm is given by the
period of 2 days to the sample period when searching for execution number of the most frequent instruction. In our
a customer complaint. case, this instruction is the computation of the short term
The results of the simulation were saved in a database mean value (Mean_ST). We can notice that the two outer
and further analyzed in two aspects of the proposed loops: carrier and calls on a carrier have a total number of
method, for 20, 30 and 40 calls: loops equal to the call number to the destination, so the
1. the percentage of the confirmed detection time complexity is given by:
events from all customer complaints Θt = Θ(call _ number * sample _ size) (19)
(Figure3.) The sample size being limited to a relatively low
number, in the order of tens, we can consider this
100
90 algorithm of linear complexity with the call number. On
20 calls
the other hand, the memory requirement is given by:
percentage of detection

80
30 calls
70
60
40 calls Θm = Θ(carrier _ number * sample _ size) (20)
50
This requirement grows linearly with the carrier
40
30
number and the sample size. For most cases, this memory
20 requirement is bounded to a low value.
10
0
0.5 0.8 0.9 0.95 0.98 0.99 0.995 0.998 0.999
Cases=get_cases(destination,search_interval)
confidence interval (1-α) Mean_LT=compute_mean(search_interval)
Figure 3. Percentage of confirmed detection events from all Sigma_LT=compute_sigma(search_interval)
customer complaints. What can be noticed is a better detection For(i=0;i<carrier_number;i++)
percentage for a lower number of calls used to compute the mean. This For(j=0;j<calls_for_carrieri;j++)
makes the test more sensitive but with a higher false positive rate, as Call_array[j%sample_size]=call[j]
seen in Figure 4.
Mean_ST=0;
For(k=0;k<sample_size;k++)
Mean_ST=
Mean_ST+call_array[k].duration/sample_size

1037

Z=compute_z_value(Mean_LT,Sigma_LT,call_array)
Foreach probability
Found=0
If(Z<probability.z_crit)
Found=search_for_case(Cases,
call_array[j%sample_size].time,call_array[(j+1)%sample
_size].time)
If(found)
confirmed_detection_event[probability]++
detection_event[probability]++
Fig. 5 pseudo-code for the Z-test algorithm
V. TESTS USING SMALL SAMPLE NUMBER (K SMALL)
In order to build a statistical test, which works for a
low number of samples (calls) that have an exponential
λ - rate parameter
B. SIMULATION ANALYSIS
The data used for the Erlang test are the same as for
the Z test presented in section IV.B. Confirming a
detection event is done using the same methodology as in
IV.B
The results of the simulation are presented in Figure 6
and Figure 7. Figure 6 confirms that this methodology is
able to detect a very high percentage of the voice quality
degradation events. The rate of false positive events is
high (only 10-20% is confirmed), although this can be
explained by the fact that the customers don’t always call
the customer service when they experience a poor quality
call.
95
90

percentage of detection
3 calls
5 calls
distribution, we will use the following methodology: as 85
10 calls
presented in 3.1, the Erlang distribution is the sum of k 80

independent exponentially distributed random variables 75

(x) with the same λ (rate parameter). 70

k
E x = ∑ x (λ )
65

60
i =1 (21) 0.5 0.8 0.9 0.95 0.98 0.99 0.995 0.998 0.999

So the sum of k call lengths will have an Erlang confidence interval (1-α)

distribution and we can compute the probability of Figure 6. Percentage of confirmed detection events from all
customer complaints using the Erlang test. An increase in the percentage
observing that or a more extreme value by: of found cases can be seen with the decreasing of the confidence
Ex interval. However this makes the test more sensitive, with a higher false
α= ∫f Erlang ( x, k , λ )dx positive rate as seen in Figure 7.
25
percentage of positive detection

0 (22)
A. THE ERLANG TEST 20
As considered in section 4, the presumption for a
15
voice quality degradation event is the lowering of the
short term average, and accordingly the null and alternate 10
hypothesis will be the same as defined above, (9) and 3 calls
5 calls
respectively (10). 5
10 calls
The test variable Ex will be computed using the 0
formula: 0.5 0.8 0.9 0.95 0.98 0.99 0.995 0.998 0.999

k confidence interval (1-α)

E x = ∑ CLi Figure 7. The percentage of confirmed detection events from all

i =1 (23)
where CLi is the call length of the i’th call (a sample
from the exponential distribution)
If the call length random variable has an exponential
distribution, then Ex will approximate the Erlang
distribution. Comparing the Ex value to the critical values
(values for which the cumulative distribution function has
the value of 0.001, 0.002, 0.005, 0.01 and so on) of the
Erlang distribution will tell us if we can reject the null
hypothesis. Our hypothesis (H0, null hypothesis) is true if
the Ex value is less than Ecrit (with a specific confidence
interval α) and H1 is true otherwise. We compute the
Ecrit values from the inverse Erlang (Gamma)
distribution with our parameters:
k - sample size
detection events using the Erlang test. The higher the number of calls
used for the computation of the average call length, the higher the
percentage of positive detection. In all cases the percentage of positive
detection has a positive slope. This is because, by definition, false
positive results (unconfirmed detection events) are more probable for
lower confidence intervals.
C. COMPLEXITY ANALYSIS
The pseudo-code of the algorithm can be seen in Fig.
8. First we compute the expected value of the exponential
distribution (Mean_LT) using a large number (long term
statistic) of calls. As presented in section 4.3, this value
changes infrequently and can be saved in a database,
avoiding the need to re-compute it.
A very complex operation is the computation of the
critical values of the Erlang distribution. As most of the
statistical libraries don’t include the Erlang distribution,

1038
this value was aquired by computing the Gamma
distribution value (as presented in section 3.1 the Erlang
distribution is a special case of the Gamma distribution).
These critical values were pre-computed for every value
of sample size (from 2 to 20) and Ex (from 1 to 5400) and
saved to a database (534600 rows). The computation of
the Erlang critical value reduces to an indexed search in a
database, search that we considered of constant time.
Cases=get_cases(destination,search_interval)
Mean_LT=compute_mean(search_interval)
For(i=0;i<carrier_number;i++)
For(j=0;j<calls_for_carrieri;j++)
Call_array[j%sample_size]=call[j]
Sum_ST=0;
For(k=0;k<sample_size;k++)
Sum_ST = Sum_ST +call_array[k].duration
Ex=Sum_ST
Foreach probability
Found=0
If(Ex <probability.erlang_crit)
Found=search_for_case(Cases,
call_array[j%sample_size].time,call_array[(j+1)%sample
_size].time)
If(found)
confirmed_detection_event[probability]++
detection_event[probability]++
Figure 8. Pseudo code for the Erlang test
The time and memory complexity analysis follows the
same steps as in IV.C, so the time and memory
requirements are expressed by:
Θt = Θ(call _ number * sample _ size) (24)
(25)
Θm = Θ(carrier _ number * sample _ size)
These requirements are linear with the call number for
the time complexity, and with the carrier number for the
memory requirements. The scaling constant sample_size
is lower by approximately a factor of 10.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
The contribution of this paper consists in depicting
and defining two new statistical methods for detecting a
significant lowering in call quality. These two new
statistical methods have a lower complexity and
computational power requirement than PESQ and 3SQM
which are the current methods. These statistical methods
were developed for both low and high call volume
destinations. Because of the low computational
requirements and the flexibility in the call volume, these
methods can be applied to medium and large scale VoIP
deployments: ex. a VoIP prepaid long distance provider.
By using them, the exact MOS value of the calls cannot
be determined, but it can be assessed if it's lower than the
average. This information is valuable for a provider with
multiple carriers for the same destination, because it can
1039
stop sending calls to a carrier whose voice quality is not
good enough.
Choosing the best algorithm for a VoIP provider for a
certain destination depends mainly on the call rate
(calls/hour) available. For low call rates the Erlang test
will give results closer to real time with a higher false
positive rate. If the call rate is higher, the Z test should be
used. Due to the larger sample size it takes into account,
the rate of false positive detection events is lower.
If one can define the cost of a false positive detection
event and the cost of not detecting a degradation event,
the optimal test (Erlang or Z), for a given confidence
level, can be computed by finding the point that
maximizes the revenue.
In the future we are planning to develop a test method
that is based on the presumption of the call distribution
being a mixture of log-normal distributions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Florin Miron and
Silvana Santa for providing the data and for many
insightful discussions that contributed to the ideas of this
paper. They would also like to thank Gheorghe Toacse for
his continous feedback, that helped improuve this paper.
REFERENCES
[1] Carolyn R.J: VoIP Reliability: A Service Provider’s Perspective,
IEEE Communications magazine, July 2004
[2] Holub B., Beerends J.G., Smid R.: A Dependence Between Average
Call Duration and Voice Transmission Quality, Wireless
telecommunication symposium, 2004
[3] Jiang W., Schulzrine H.: Assessment of VoIP Service Availability in
The current internet. Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on
Passive and Active Network Measurement (PAM 2003)
[4] Willingner W., Paxon V.: Where Mathematics meets the Internet
Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 1998
[5] Jedrzycki C., Leung VCM.: Probability distribution of Channel
Holding time in Cellular Telephony Systems IEEE 46th Vehicular
Technology Conference, 1996
[6] ITU-T Rec. P.861 Objective quality measurement of telephone-band
speech codecs, International Telecommunication Union, Geneva, 1996
[7] ITU-T Rec. P.862: Perceptual evaluation of speech quality,
International Telecommunication Union, Geneva, 2001
[8] ITU-T Rec. P.563: Single-ended method for objective speech quality
assessment in narrow-band telephony applications, International
Telecommunication Union, Geneva, 2004
[9] Opticom “3SQM OEM User manual” version 2.0.1
[10] Barcelo F., Jordan J.: Channel Holding Time Distribution in
Cellular Telephony, 9th. Int. Conf. on Wireless Communications
(Wireless ’97), Calgary, July 1997
[11] V. Bolotin: Telephone Circuit Holding Time Distribution, Proc. 14th
International Teletraffic Congress pp. 125-134, North Holland, 1994
[12] Chlebus E.: Empirical validation of Call Holding Time Distribution
In Cellular Communications Systems, Proc. 15th International Teletraffic
Congress pp. 1179-1189, Elsevier Science B.V., 1997