4 General

3GPP46.062Comfort noise aspects for Enhanced Full Rate (EFR) speech traffic channelsRelease 17TS

A basic problem when using DTX is that the background acoustic noise, which is transmitted together with the speech, would disappear when the radio transmission is cut, resulting in discontinuities of the background noise. Since the DTX switching can take place rapidly, it has been found that this effect can be very annoying for the listener – especially in a car environment with high background noise levels. In bad cases, the speech may be hardly intelligible.

The present document specifies the way to overcome this problem by generating on the receive (RX) side synthetic noise similar to the transmit (TX) side background noise. The comfort noise parameters are estimated on the TX side and transmitted to the RX side before the radio transmission is switched off and at a regular low rate afterwards. This allows the comfort noise to adapt to the changes of the noise on the TX side.