The question at which layer network functionality is presented or abstracted remains a research challenge. Traditionally, network functionality was either placed into the core network, middleboxes, or into the operating system - but recent developments have expanded the design space to directly introduce functionality into the application (and in particular into the browser) as a way to expose it to the user.

This paper describes the scalable coder - G.729.1 - which has been recently standardized by ITU-T for wideband telephony and voice over IP (VoIP) applications. G.729.1 can operate at 12 different bit rates from 32 down to 8 kbit/s with wideband quality starting at 14 kbit/s. This coder is a bitstream interoperable extension of ITU-T G.729 based on three embedded stages: narrowband cascaded CELP coding at 8 and 12 kbit/s, time-domain bandwidth extension (TDBWE) at 14 kbit/s, and split-band MDCT coding with spherical vector quantization (VQ) and pre-echo reduction from 16 to 32 kbit/s. Side information - consisting of signal class, phase, and energy - is transmitted at 12, 14 and 16 kbit/s to improve the resilience and recovery of the decoder in case of frame erasures. The quality, delay, and complexity of G.729.1 are summarized based on ITU-T results.

Recommendation G.729.1 is a new ITU-T standard which was approved in May 2006. This recommendation describes a hierarchical speech and audio coding algorithm built on top of a narrowband core codec. One challenge in the codec design is the generation of a wideband signal with a very limited additional bit rate (less than 2 kb/s). In this paper, we describe the respective codec layer, which extends the transmitted acoustic bandwidth from the narrowband frequency range (50 Hz-4 kHz) to the wideband frequency range (50 Hz-7 kHz). The underlying algorithm uses a fairly coarse parametric description of the temporal and spectral energy envelopes of the high frequency band (4-7 kHz). This parameter set is quantized with a bit rate of 1.65 kb/s. At the decoder side, the high-frequency components are regenerated by appropriately shaping a synthetically generated ldquoexcitation signal.rdquo Apart from the algorithmic description and a discussion, we state a complexity evaluation as well as some listening test results.

We present an embedded and hierarchical 8-32 kbit/s speech and audio coding algorithm that has been successfully submitted to the ITU-T as a candidate for ITU-T Rec. G.729.1 (ex G.729EV). The submitting consortium consisted of Siemens AG, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., and Mindspeed Technologies Inc. This contribution gives a comprehensive overview of the proposed codec, describes the implemented algorithms, and states a detailed characterization as well as results of the official G.729EV qualification tests

This paper presents an enhancement layer coming on top of G.729 Annex A codec. This enhancement layer consists of an optimization of the algebraic fixed codebook pulses that were selected by the Annex A codec during the fixed codebook search. The pulses selected by the ACELP codec have all the same absolute amplitude. Our method optimizes each of these amplitudes in order to increase the quality. This is a low-complexity method that allows the introduction of an intermediate bitrate in ACELP-based scalable coder. On top of this pulse optimization method that requires 1.6 kbit/s we introduce a second fixed codebook search with a limited number of pulses (2) and a bitrate of 2.4 kbit/s