Wideband speech coding for cdma2000® systems

Wideband speech and audio coding has been gaining popularity in recent years. To address the need for wideband speech coding, the Third-Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2) embarked upon an effort to develop a wideband codec standard for cdma2000® systems. After close evaluation of several candidate codecs, 3GPP2 selected the variable-rate multimode wideband (VMR-WB) codec proposed by Nokia and VoiceAge Corp. as the standard. In this paper, an overview of VMR-WB standardization process, architecture and functional features of VMR-WB is provided, and further some information on the performance of VMR-WB is presented. Finally, some potential applications for the newly selected standard are proposed.