Study and implementation of low complexity communication codec for audio and voice applications

Abstract

Over the years, Bluetooth has played a vital role in the evolution of wireless technologies. Bluetooth being the means of short-range wireless communication has been involved in personal, portable, and many other electronic devices. It operates on an unlicensed ISM 2.4 GHz band and is now being maintained by Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group). In 2010, as a part of Bluetooth 4.0 core specification, Bluetooth SIG added a new feature to the existing Bluetooth technology known as BLE (Bluetooth low energy) or Bluetooth smart. BLE mainly focuses on low power consumption, low cost, and long battery life as compared to Classic Bluetooth. Apart from this Bluetooth SIG has recently introduced a new generation of Bluetooth audio known as LE Audio in Bluetooth version 5.2. LE Audio provides high-quality audio even at data rates which are almost half as compared to Classic Bluetooth audio. LE Audio is designed not only to support the existing audio products but also to add new exciting features like audio sharing, broadcasting, multi-streaming, and support for hearing aid. A new audio codec was introduced along with LE Audio in order to support these features which is called LC3 (Low Complexity Communication Codec). The role of audio codec is to compress the audio at the transmitting end and decompress it at the receiving end. This audio codec can be used to encode audio at a variety of bitrates and is more efficient as compared to SBC(Sub-band Codec used in Classic Bluetooth). This thesis represents the study and implementation of Low Complexity communication codec for audio and voice applications. The scope of our implementation is to provide better audio quality with lower data rates as compared to SBC. Here, we have used C language for the implementation of LC3 Codec and audio profile.