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peer-reviewed, Quality of service (QoS) is a measure of a communication network performance that reflects the transmission quality and service availability as perceived by the users. In the context of telecommunications, voice communication quality is the most visible and important aspects to QoS, and the ability to monitor and design for this quality should be a top priority. Voice quality refers to the clearness Or a speaker's voice as perceived by a listener. Its measurement offers a means of adding the human end-user's perspective to traditional ways of performing network management evaluation of voice telephony services. Traditionally, measurement of users' perception of voice quality has been performed by expensive and time-consuming subjective listening tests. Over the last decade, numerous attempts have been made to supplement subjective tests with objective measurements based on algorithms that can be computerised and automated. This paper examines some of the technicalities associated with voice duality Measurement, and presents a review of current subjective and objective voice quality measurement methods and standards as applied to telecommunication systems and devices, with particular focus on recent and internationally standardised methods. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved., In press

This paper describes a new game assessment metric for the online gamer. The metric is in line with a mathematical model currently used for network planning assessment. In addition to the traditional network-based parameters such as delay, jitter and packet loss, new parameters based on subjective assessment are introduced. The metric aims to estimate game quality as perceived by an online game player. In order to validate and calibrate the proposed metric a subjective game quality assessment is also proposed. Two 5-point scales are introduced: a game-quality scale and a game playing-effort scale. The mean average of each scales termed, as Mean Opinion Score (MOS), will indicate the game quality (MOSGQE) and the playing-effort required (MOSGPE). Reported evaluation results indicate a high level of correlation when compared with other algorithms. Comparative results have been carried out for three online games.

Wireless sensor networks witnessed an increased attention over the last years due to their potential to monitor the environment. With the sensing technology of such networks large areas can be monitored and a comprehensive study of the environment be explored. Usually, handling wireless sensor networks requires prior knowledge about the technology and this represents a key issue for a first time user. This issue creates a limitation for a first time user's ability to explore the whole potential of the networks. A novel integration of wireless sensor networks technology with voice user interface technology is proposed and developed by the authors. This integration allows the creation of a new platform for developing innovative interactions between wireless sensor networks and the user regardless of their software skills. The interface is developed using the voice recognition features of the Center for Spoken Language Understanding (CSLU) toolkit to control a network of wireless sensors. The interaction between the user and sensor network is entirely through voice input. In addition, this work explores the use of voice controlled setup and management for sensor network deployment.