Pedagogy Of A Course In Speech Coding And Voice Over Ip

The area of Speech Coding and Voice-over-Internet Protocol (Voice-over-IP) has become an important application area of Digital Signal Processing in the Electrical Engineering curriculum. This is due in part to the ubiquity of wireless and wire-line communication devices and appliances that utilize speech coding and voice-over-internet protocol (IP) methods. We have recently developed a three-course sequence on Speech Coding and Voice-over-IP taken by Senior-level undergraduate and graduate students at Santa Clara University. The first two courses teach Speech Coding while the third course deals with Voice-over-IP. Most of the fundamentals are on Digital Signal Processing but we focus on the applications to speech and voice coding. In this paper, we first describe the DSP curriculum for both undergraduate and graduate students. We describe our experiences and the challenges encountered in developing these courses. We detail some of the laboratory and teaching materials and the exercises developed, etc. We discuss as an example the internet low-bit rate speech coder (iLBC) which is used to code speech under packet loss conditions that exists on the internet. Finally, we present possible future directions in the course development.