ASM: 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 multihop 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 (FEC) 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 test bed of 18 nodes. The experiment results show that ASM can achieve satisfactory multicast voice quality in dynamic environments while incurring low-communication overhead.