Joint coding rate control for audio streaming in short range wireless networks

Streaming high quality audio/video (AV) from home media sources to TV sets and audio speakers over a wireless local area network (WLAN) is a challenging problem because of the fluctuating bandwidth caused by interference and fading. Retransmission and data buffering, as common techniques in data transfer over error-prone channels, are not adequate for delay sensitive applications such as high quality audio streaming. Our approach is to adjust the audio data rate dynamically in order to improve the perceptual quality of audio according to wireless channel quality. In this paper we specifically focus on robust audio streaming over short range wireless channels. The major strength of the proposed algorithm is in its ability to match the source and channel coding parameters to the given channel conditions, thus providing better quality and lower latency of audio in home networking.