NIST Measures Mission Critical Voice Comms Performance

The National Institute of Standards and Technologies has its fingers in many different pies. The electronics buffs among us know them for their work in electronics standards, such as voltage standards, and the WWVx time and frequency standards stations.

In addition to these activities, amateur radio operators should also know about their work with emergency communications. A recent blog post, “Mission Critical Voice Communications: Your Life May Depend on It!” discusses some of the latest work being done by the  Public Safety Communications Research division (PSCR) in Boulder, Colorado.

The PSCR’s Mission Critical Voice team is developing methods to measure the performance of voice communications systems such as radio and push-to-talk over cellular networks. The team includes five electronics engineers and three mathematicians. The electronics engineers — myself among them — provide voice communications and systems knowledge, whereas the mathematicians focus on more of the data-processing analysis and measurement uncertainty calculations.

The blog post says:

Currently, our group is developing a series of measurement methods to quantify the performance of voice communication systems with the end-user experience — in this case, the first responder — in mind. These quality-of-experience measurements differ from traditional quality-of-service measurements because they focus on the external events that describe the user interaction with the system. For example, end-to-end access time is a measurement based on the receiving user hearing an intelligible voice. In contrast, quality-of-service measurements focus on the technical, internal system-specific measurements and may not be a good indicator of the actual user experience.

I’d suggest that if amateur radio was really serious about emergency communications that we’d get connected to groups like this. At the very least, someone in the amateur radio community should be aware of this research and be responsible for evaluating it with regards to the communications services that we provide.