Abstract: Techniques for discontinuous transmission (DTX) and fast in-band signaling of configuration changes and protocol messages in speech communications systems provide cost efficiency in terms of radio transmission capacity, in terms of fixed line transmission, and in terms of implementation effort. An exemplary method for performing discontinuous transmission (DTX) in a communications system in which source data is interleaved for transmission from a first component in the system to a second component in the system includes the steps of detecting periods of source data inactivity, and transmitting silence descriptor (SID) frames from the first to the second component during the periods of source data inactivity, certain of the transmitted SID frames being interleaved using a different interleaving algorithm as compared to that used for source data. For example, the source data can be block diagonally interleaved, and certain of the SID frames can be block interleaved.

Abstract: In order to simplify the setup of telephone conference with distributed conference devices, each conference participant applies speech encoding to its own speech signal in order to reduce the bandwidth of its speech signal thus that the bandwidth compressed speech signal shows at least half of the bandwidth of the data transport channel. Each compressed speech signal is inserted to the data transport channel and that each conference participant extracts the compressed speech signals of the other parties from the data transport channel. Each participant then decodes the compressed speech signals and each conference participant sums up all decoded speech signals to a sum signal.

Abstract: Techniques for discontinuous transmission (DTX) and fast in-band signaling of configuration changes and protocol messages in speech communications systems provide cost efficiency in terms of radio transmission capacity, in terms of fixed line transmission, and in terms of implementation effort. An exemplary method for performing discontinuous transmission (DTX) in a communications system in which source data is interleaved for transmission from a first component in the system to a second component in the system includes the steps of detecting periods of source data inactivity, and transmitting silence descriptor (SID) frames from the first to the second component during the periods of source data inactivity, certain of the transmitted SID frames being interleaved using a different interleaving algorithm as compared to that used for source data. For example, the source data can be block diagonally interleaved, and certain of the SID frames can be block interleaved.