Assessment of voice call quality in SCIP encrypted traffic

摘要

The strategy of secure communication originating from the NNEC (NATO network Enabled Capability) conceptassumes the use of effective and safe transport mechanisms at various levels of the heterogonous C2 (Command andControl) NATO systems. SCIP (Secure Communication Interoperability Protocol) is the basic solution introduced byNATO for secure communication of different network devices through networks with restricted bandwidth. SCIPtechnology is designed to provide interoperable end-to-end connectivity in a variety of communication systems, frommilitary radio communication, traditional telephone communication system through satellite communication channels toVoIP and various types of mobile telephony standards. It is designed to operate at the application layer with minimaldependency on the characteristics of the lower layers. The implementation of the SCIP protocol in various devicesrequires the unification of transmission and signaling procedures as well as the methods of coding the speech signal. Themain challenge associated with this issue is therefore the provision of high security, high availability and high quality ofservice (QoS). The implementation of any encryption algorithm in nowadays heterogenous networks with restrictedbandwidth can lead to degradation of the voice quality due to increased loss packets and packet latency. This paper willinvestigate how the end-to-end SCIP encryption impacts on QoS of voice communication. The quality of voice call isassessed in terms of lost packet ratio, latency and jitter with and without SCIP algorithm. Research are performed usingthe MultiDSLA tester and PESQ and POLQA methods. The results of laboratory tests indicate what effect does SCIPencryption-based security has on the voice call quality.