Energy Efficiency of Network-Based Acoustic Echo Control in Mobile Radio

In this contribution we investigate the energy efficiency of network-based acoustic echo control (AEC). Usually, AEC is implemented in the mobile terminal. Due to the limited resources of the mobile terminal in terms of the battery, computational capacity and memory, the complexity of the AEC algorithm has to be limited. In this paper we will investigate the idea to move the AEC processing from the mobile terminal to a network-based processing unit which allows to use more sophisticated algorithms. As this might require the use of improved speech codecs with higher bit rate, we will evaluate the trade-off between increased power for the radio transmission with additional bit rate and the reduced power for signal processing at the mobile terminal. This implies to take into consideration the attenuation of the radio channel according to, e.g., the Okumura-Hata path loss model.