Most people view sleep as a biological necessity designed to rejuvenate and invigorate body and mind so that human beings can function effectively when they are awake. While awake we tend to eat, dispose of waste, spawn the new generation, and take care of business, so that when the day is over we can go back to sleep.

When asked: “What is life's purpose?” we immediately think of life as the time we spend on earth while being awake.

Now let's reverse the paradigm. Let's pretend for a brief moment that life's purpose is a good sleep, and that all of the energetic activities above are designed to sustain our ability to go back and “live” (while asleep) the next day (see Figure 16.1).

I know. This is a weird thought, but let's see if we can apply the concept to voice-quality engineering in wireless networks, so that it makes sense.

Voice-quality systems are designed to operate on voice and to disable themselves on detection of data transmission. In other words, when turning on the VQS, voice-enhancement applications are enabled automatically while the system goes on guard, watching for any data that might require a disabling action.

Now let's reverse the paradigm. Let's disable all or a particular VQ application upon system turn-on, and continue to monitor the channel until voice is detected. When this occurs, the system enables the VQ application, and then puts it back to sleep when the monitored signal no longer looks like voice.