Design and Implementation of Real-Time Voice Streaming Evaluation Platform Over Wireless Sensor Network (VoWSN)

Abstract

The vast progress of embedded low-cost, low-power Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology has prompted researchers attention to exploit this technology in applications those require real time voice transmission. By equipping WSN devices with some extra components, the devices are able of streaming or transmitting voice in real-time. This paper is aimed to propose, implement, and evaluate (using performance evaluation parameters: one-way delay, jitter, B.W, and CPU usage) the performance of a framework to be used for processing, compressing and streaming voice to a remote computer over Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) network using a Raspberry Pi3 (RPi3) and open source FFmpeg technology. The framework has to be configurable to use AC3, MP3 and OPUS audio encoding algorithms with different sampling rates. For voice streaming, this paper presents unreliable transport mechanisms involving combinations of MPEG-2 Transport Stream (MPEG-2 TS) container, Real Time Transport Protocol (RTP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). To keep the cost low, the operating system used within this research is the Raspbian and the device driver is Advance Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA).