EVS – New Codec for 4G and 5G

Inhalt:
Enhanced Voice Service (EVS) was introduced and standardized by 3GPP as the new designated voice codec family for IP based mobile wireless speech services for 4G and 5G systems. Compared to the legacy AMR codec family, EVS offers superior voice quality and user perception utilizing higher voice sampling rates and other mechanisms designed for more efficient wireless transmission. It provides an increased link budget and better coverage (e.g., indoors) due to efficient and effective adaptation to the wireless channel properties and realizes higher system resource efficiency paired with the improved speech quality. This paper firstly provides some elementary background of the EVS speech coding and voice quality aspects. In a second part the great gains achieved by EVS with respect to speech quality, coverage and possible reductions in system resource utilization are highlighted. The statements are underlined with measurements executed in commercial networks.