Effects of handover on Voice quality in wireless convergent networks

Fixed and mobile communications convergence scenario under the user perspective is being depicted as combination of wireless and cellular networks. This is possible by the use of multimode terminals, and application servers located in the core network, that facilitates the handover between the different base stations whatever the wireless or cellular standard is used in the convergent network. Since most of the cellular and wireless technologies were not intended to interact among themselves or even support handover, it is necessary to complement the radio network design with the impact of both horizontal handover between wireless stations, and vertical handover between wireless and cellular stations on the conversation quality. Since voice quality will in many cases be discontinuous, the present paper proposes a simple method to estimate the impact on the voice quality caused by handover discontinuities in the access network, and therefore to enable the corrective actions to ensure a satisfactory user experience.