Towards Layer Adaptation for Audio Transmission

When audio is transmitted over the wireless channel, the quality of the audio depends on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The purpose of this paper is to investigate if rate adaptation can be avoided, and a system can rely instead on the audio encoder and decoder to alleviate the effect of channel errors. To this end, the paper reports on a set of experiments on various combinations of channel conditions, constellation sizes and audio encoding used and on the final audio quality achieved. The Mean Opinion Score (MOS) is used for performance evaluation. The MOS values are generated using the ITU-T P.862 (PESQ) and P.863 (POLQA) algorithms, and also using tests by experts. The results support the common practice of adapting the physical layer parameters to changing channel conditions. However, in some cases, it is possible to maintain a constant rate without impacting significantly the quality of the audio. This means that the complexity associated with physical layer and audio rate adaptation can be avoided leading to simpler and more robust designs.