Potential physical layer enhancements for AMR speech over EDGE

Currently one of EDGE Phase II activities is a concept development for providing real time services including voice with 8-PSK modulated signals in the EDGE environment. The introduction of speech services in EDGE allows one to allocate more speech users and also would pave a way for high quality speech codecs. We outline a potential physical layer enhancement for EDGE including a multiplexing of two users with possibly different data rates within one TDMA slot. As a practical example the transmission of voice with adaptive multirate (AMR) speech codecs in GSM/EDGE environments is considered. The presented method of user multiplexing allows one to increase the interleaving depth and improve the radio-link budget.