Description of GSM enhanced full rate speech codec

This paper describes the enhanced full rate (EFR) speech codec that has been standardized by ETSI for the GSM mobile communications system in 1996. The codec was developed jointly by Nokia and the University of Sherbrooke. It operates at 12.2 kbit/s speech coding (source coding) bit-rate and provides speech quality equivalent to that of wireline telephony (G.726 32 kbit/s ADPCM). The algorithm is based on the algebraic code-excited linear prediction (ACELP) technology, using 20 ms speech frames. The GSM EFR speech codec provides substantial quality improvement compared to the current GSM full rate (FR) and half rate (HR) codecs. The old GSM codecs lag far behind wireline quality even in error-free conditions, while the EFR codec provides wireline quality also for the most typical error conditions. With the EFR codec, wireline quality is also sustained in the presence of background noise and in tandem connections (mobile-to-mobile calls). The codec was defined using fixed-point basic operators with complexity estimated at 18 WMOPS (below that of the GSM half-rate codec)