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its first transmission th e transport delay can be less than a millisecond but if one or more
retransmissions have been scheduled it will take a few more milliseconds before the last
possible transmission would be received at the synchronisation reference point the
earliest that can occur with bluetooth le audio is around ms from the point where the
first sample for that audio frame was taken and is the fixed point in time at which every
acceptor can start to decode their received packets the synchronisation reference point is
where the presentation delay starts within this period the acceptor needs to decode the
lc packet which takes a few milliseconds fo r the lc decoder and apply the packet loss
concealment if that is required which takes another few milliseconds although its not
needed for most packets the time to run the algorithm has to be allocated for the occasions
where it is required if a ny other audio processing needs to be done such as algorithms for
noise cancellation or speech enhancement they need to be completed before the end of the
section quality of service qos
presentation delay which is where each acceptor renders the reconstituted audio stream
because t he basic audio profile requires that e very acceptor must support a value of ms
for presentation delay they need to support around ms of buffering to hold the decoded
audio data before the rendering point in practice the value of presentation delay may be
lower or greater manufacturers of receiving devices may support a range from as low as
ms up to several hundred milliseconds
if everything is optimised t he quickest this whole process can happen for a ms lc
packet is just over ms using a ms frame makes little difference as the shorter frame
needs a longer look ahead delay so the saving is only around ms
a ms delay is equivalent to the time it takes sound to travel m our hearing has evolved
to cope with th is level of delay if we hear an original sound and an echo ms later
the brain processes it without any difficulty that means that we can use bluetooth le
audio streams for earbuds and hearing aids which pick up the ambient sound as well as a
bluetooth stream with out the wearer being distracted by any echo effects however the
example above involved a lot of optimisations it assumes that transmission can start as
soon as the encoding is complete and that all retransmissions happen within a quarter of a
frame which is only valid for small packets and the lower sampling frequencies in most
real applications other factors come into play which brings us to the quality of service or
qos
quality of service qos
quality of service is a term applied to the received audio signal and encompasses latency the
perceived sound of the decoded audio and the incidence of any audio artefacts such as pops
crackles and gaps all of these features have trade offs with each other the latency
example described above is a highly idealised one where packets arrive when theyre
expected in practice they dont the human body is very efficient at absorbing bluetooth
signals so if someone is wearing earbuds but has their phone in the back pocket of their
jeans the signal between the phone and the earbuds may be attenuated by up to db if
youre in a room that may not matter as the earbud will probably pick up reflected signals
from the walls or ceiling but if youre outsid e where you dont have those reflecting
surfaces far more packets will be lost
in the previous chapter we saw that t he design of isochronous channel s adds robustness by
using retransmissions pretransmissions burst numbers flush timeouts and frequenc y
hopping if we apply enough of these features we have a very high confidence that almost
every packet will get through and the small number that dont arrive intact can be filled in
using plc however as we apply these techniques latency starts to increase as does power
consumption spreading retransmissions across more than a single isochronous interval
adds an extra frame time to the latency for each additional isochronous interval putting
more retransmissions within a single frame limits the n umber of different streams which can
be accommodated and pushes up the power both for the transmitter and also for the
receiver which needs to stay active to look for consecutive transmission slots
chapter lc latency and qos
these robustness features are separate from the codec settings but the codec settings also
have an effect on robustness h igher quality encoding with khz sampling will produce
larger packets which will be more susceptible to interference similarly if you encode
multi ple audio streams into a single packet ie the channel allocation is greater than that
sdu will contain multiple codec frames resulting in larger packets with the same problem
given the large number of possible codec and robustness configurations that are allowed
bap has def ined sets of standard combinations aimed at the two major use cases low
latency and high reliability which can be found in tables and of bap they cover
both ms and ms frame intervals
low latency is interpreted as settings which will allow all of the retransmissions to fit within
a single isochronous interval for sampling rates of khz to khz the larger packets for
khz extend into two isochronous intervals going up to four isochr onous intervals for
khz high reliability qos configurations prioritise retransmission over latency allowing
retransmissions to be spread across six or more isochronous intervals for broadcast and ten
or more for unicast
table shows the maximum number of isochronous interval s allowed for each sampling
frequency derived from these tables the reason that the low latency khz sampled
setting needs two isochronous interval s is to allow a sufficient number of retransmissions
with the larger packets as only a limited number fit into a single isochronous interval for
low sampling frequencies the smaller packets mean that more retransmissions can be fitted
into each isochronous interval how many retransmissions are allocated is ultimately down
to the scheduler in the controller
table the m aximum number of isochronous intervals allowed for bap qos settings
in the latency example of figure we saw that using lc with a ms frame and a
significant degree of optimisation gave an overall latency of just over ms that u sed a low latency
high reliability
unicast broadcast
sampling frequency ms ms ms ms ms ms
khz
khz
khz
khz
khz
khz kbps
khz kbps
the khz figures differ because they are defined for framed pdus all other sampling
rates are unframed
section quality of service qos
presentation delay of just over ms i f low latency is important to an application
implement ers need to be careful about their choice of qos and codec configuration as it can
result in the latency increasing significantly table shows the actual overall latency values
which are likely to achieved these have been calculated using a value of ms for the lc
to sampling and encod e a ms fr ame
low latency high reliability
unicast and broadcast unicast broadcast
sampling