Adaptive Voice Stream Multicast Over Low-Power Wireless Networks

Low-power Wireless Networks (LWNs) have become increasingly available for mission-critical applications such as security surveillance and disaster response. In particular, emerging low-power wireless audio platforms provide an economical solution for ad hoc voice communication in emergency scenarios. In this paper, we develop a system called Adaptive Stream Multicast (ASM) for voice communication over multi-hop LWNs. ASM is composed of several novel components specially designed to deliver robust voice quality for multiple sinks in dynamic environments: 1) an empirical model to automatically evaluate the voice quality perceived at sinks based on current network condition, 2) a feedback-based Forward Error Correction scheme where the source can adapt its coding redundancy ratio dynamically in response to the voice quality variation at sinks, 3) a Tree-based Opportunistic Routing (TOR) protocol that fully exploits the broadcast opportunities on a tree based on novel forwarder selection and coordination rules, and 4) a distributed admission control algorithm that ensures the voice quality guarantees when admitting new voice streams. ASM has been implemented on a low-power hardware platform and extensively evaluated through experiments on a testbed of 18 nodes.