Quality Improvement in a GSM signal



Quality Improvement in a GSM signal

Introduction

Engineers are innovators who develop new devices, products and applications to ease the working and daily life of human beings. One of the toughest tasks for an engineer is to improve the existing system of any particular product. Improvement in any of the product is to challenge the current working of the product and to ensure that it has a better quality. The modern day engineers have this common task to improve the quality of existing devices and products.

The role of engineer as a quality improving engineer is not hidden as all the products have dramatic improvements in their ease and use on the basis of the working of their engineers. This includes an engineer's efforts in modifying cars from a travelling necessity to a luxurious accessory, from converting cars from low mileage vehicles to high mileage hybrid engine vehicles, similarly mobile phones transforming from a handy device to communicate into an interactive device that has the speed and functions similar to a computer.

Even though the engineers have utilized a lot of time in producing and improving quality of majority of devices still many normal day procedures expects an engineer to work and improve the quality of the remaining products. One of the areas of concern for the engineers is to improve the quality of the GSM signal which makes the communication between a mobile phone and other communicating device possible (Doclo et al. 2009, 38 - 51).

Problem Statement

The mobile phone communication is one of the most used mean of communication, however, the signal strength is very good and majority of the customers are quite satisfied by the level of communication provided by the signal in normal scenarios, however, in cases when one of the parties communicating is present in a noisy environment the quality of the signal deteriorates to a great degree. This drastic quality degradation is a great concern for not only the normal user but for the service provider as well (Anderson et al. 2002).

Voice Activity Detector (VAD)

In order to improve the quality of the signal various techniques are possible and are currently employed by the mobile phone operators to challenge the scenario, however, the most robust and effective technique till date is the use of Voice activity Detector (VAD) to cater the problems of noisy signal.

A speech signal posses two attributes, firstly the conversational speech secondly the silence between the words spoken by the person the role of the VAD is to separate these two characteristics for further processing. This technique of VAD is used in various applications out of them the major ones are of recognition of speech, coding of speech, cancellation of echo and telephony devices which are hands free (Gorriz, 2005, 877 - 879).

The major impact on any hands free device communication is the effect of noise and the level of degradation it causes to the signal. In cases when a signal is acquired which is noise free it used as a threshold ...