4 General

3GPP46.081Discontinuous Transmission (DTX) for Enhanced Full Rate (EFR) speech traffic channelsRelease 17TS

Discontinuous Transmission (DTX) is a mechanism which allows the radio transmitter to be switched off most of the time during speech pauses for the following two purposes:

– to save power in the Mobile Station (MS);

– to reduce the overall interference level over the air interface;

DTX shall be in operation in GSM MS if commanded so by the network, see GSM 04.08 [2].

4.1 General organization

The overall DTX mechanism described in the present document requires the following functions:

– a Voice Activity Detector (VAD) on the transmit (TX) side;

– evaluation of the background acoustic noise on the transmit (TX) side, in order to transmit characteristic parameters to the receive (RX) side;

– generation on the receive (RX) side of a similar noise, called comfort noise, during periods where the radio transmission is switched off.

The Voice Activity Detector (VAD) is defined in GSM 06.82 [12] and the comfort noise functions in GSM 06.62 [11]. Both are based partly on the speech transcoder and its internal variables, defined in GSM 06.60 [9].

In addition to these functions, if the parameters arriving at the RX side are detected to be seriously corrupted by errors, the speech or comfort noise must be generated from substituted data in order to avoid seriously annoying effects for the listener. This function is defined in GSM 06.61 [10].

An overall description of the speech processing parts can be found in GSM 06.51 [6].