Assessment of Call Voice Quality of GSM Network Operators in 5 Cities in Kwara State
K. O. Kadiri
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Federal Polytechnic, Offa, Kwara State, Nigeria and Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute, Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Groningen, Nijenbourgh 7, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands.
Samuel Oluwaseun Lawal *
Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Landmark University, Omu-Aran, Kwara State, Nigeria.
Olawale Saheed Babatunde
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Federal Polytechnic, Offa, Kwara State, Nigeria.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
This paper evaluates voice quality of four Global System for Mobile (GSM) Communication providers in five selected cities in Kwara State with thoughtfulness of network performance evaluation and the quality of service (QoS) improvement of GSM network system. Three assessment components/parameters which are network accessibility, service retainability and connection quality for evaluating QoS on the network were mainly adopted. The parameters were applied on four GSM networks in the studied areas using customers’ complaints method. Also, a standard method known as Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) — (International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector) ITU-T standard P.862, used for measuring call voice quality and Mean Opinion Score (MOS) is adopted. The two methods were therefore compared to assess call voice quality of the four GSM networks. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on which the GSM networks were tested include call set-up success rates (CSSR), call drop rate (CDR), call completion success rates (CCSR), handover success rates (HSR) and traffic channel congestion rate (TCHR). The result of the study shows that the Quality of Service of GSM system in the selected cities is unreliable. The study also shows that the GSM network accessibility and retainability in the country are unsatisfactory. However, the call voice quality was observed to be on the peak in these cities across the four network providers. At the end of this manuscript, suggestions are given on how to advance both the Quality of Service and the positive impact of GSM network in the selected areas and the country as a whole.
Keywords: Call voice quality, GSM network providers, key performance indicators (KPIs), PESQ, algorithm