Introduction

With fast evolution of telecom network’s the CPSs together with the equipment suppliers always try to amaze the end customers. Voice and data (internet) evolution have been major examples of this. Like VoLTE introduced the HD voice codecs which gives better calling experience.

Now the question is what extra 5G and advance would offer for voice?

Answer is there are several areas where different standardization bodies (3GPP and GSMA) are working to evolve the voice experience.

One of them is “Interactive Calling”:

Interactive Calling

• Interactive Calling : Suppose you are calling a Pizza store and in the calling screen itself you are able to navigate into what are available toping options, while interacting with the agent taking your order.
  • Meaning that together with the voice session, a data session is created so as users talking to each other can share media as well in the same call session.
  • Data channels do not require use of any codec but allows for real-time interaction in parallel to the conversational media. All conversational media components are transported over RTP with each respective payload format mapped onto the RTP (RFC 3550 [9]) streams. The data channels are using SCTP.

Use Cases:

• While calling to an enterprise i,e. Pizza shop, the pizza shop can interactively display the different available option in the device screen. Like interactive menu option
• Interactive remote support.

The UE and the network must be able to establish a data channel session directly during session establishment and by adding data channel to a voice or video session by sending Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) (re-)INVITE request with a Session Description Protocol (SDP) offer that contains the data channel media descriptor in addition to the existing media descriptors. The UE must include the data channel media feature tag, as defined in 3GPP Release 16 TS 26.114.

References:

• 3GPP TS 26.114 release 16 onwards
• GSMA IR 92

Related Topics:

• 5G Voice Services Implementation Options
• Voice over NR Call Flow
• VoNR with Robust Header Compression (ROHC)
• 5G AMF – Access and Mobility Management Function
• 5G Service Based Architecture 

Article Submitted By: Vijay Sharma