Operational Evaluation of a Voice Concentrator Over AUTOVON Interswitch Trunks

This paper describes results of test and evaluation of a commercial voice concentrator applied to AUTOVON interswitch trunks between Feldberg, Germany and Ft. Detrick, MD. By virtue of time assignment speech interpolation (TASI) techniques, the voice concentrator provided approximately a 2-to-1 compression of voice channels onto trunks, with a configuration of 17 channels onto nine trunks selected for this AUTOVON application. Tests consisted of: 1) signaling performance characterization through the voice concentrator, 2) voice channel characterization of the nine selected trunks before and after cutover of the voice concentrator, 3) performance characterization of data signals operated through voice concentrator channels, 4) traffic data collection and analysis, and 5) user subjective evaluation. Test results indicated acceptable performance for the intended application, which was limited primarily to voice signals. Since completion of the testing and subsequent analysis, the Defense Communications Agency (DCA) has accepted the voice concentrator system for operational use with AUTOVON IST's in the Defense Communications System (DCS).