Optimal Audio Transmission over Wireless Tandem Channels

Delivering high quality audio over the error prone wireless networks has to address many challenges. Some of these challenges include reducing the packetization overhead of small audio frames as well as protecting audio content against both bit errors introduced by wireless channels and packet erasures introduced by network buffering. We propose a statistical optimization framework for transmitting audio sequences over wireless MIMO channels. Our proposed framework protects audio frames against both temporally correlated random bit errors introduced by a fading channel and packet erasures caused by network buffering. The framework forms a two-dimensional grid of symbols Fig. 1 and forms horizontal packets that are compensated only vertically against both types of errors. Our framework assigns parity bits according to the perceptual importance of frames such that the segmented SNR of a received audio sequence is maximized. In addition, the proposed framework suggests an effective way of reducing the packetization overhead of small audio frames.