Performance Evaluation of VoLTE Based on Field Measurement Data

Abstract: Voice over Long-Term Evolution (VoLTE) has been witnessing a rapid deployment by network carriers worldwide. During the phases of VoLTE deployments, carriers would typically face challenges in understanding the factors affecting the VoLTE performance and then optimizing it to meet or exceed the performance of the legacy circuit switched (CS) network (i.e., 2G/3G). The main challenge of VoLTE service quality is the LTE network optimization and the performance aspects of the service in different LTE deployment scenarios. In this paper, we present a detailed practical performance analysis of VoLTE based on commercially deployed 3GPP Release-10 LTE networks. The analysis evaluates VoLTE performance in terms of real-time transport protocol (RTP) error rate, RTP jitter and delays, block error rate (BLER) in different radio conditions and VoLTE voice quality in terms of mean opinion score (MOS). In addition, the paper evaluates key VoLTE features such as RObust Header Compression (ROHC) and transmission time interval (TTI) bundling. This paper provides guidelines for best practices of VoLTE deployment as well as practical performance evaluation based on field measurement data from commercial LTE networks.