Ethernet Real-Time Audio Transmission to FPGA

Real-time audio transmission over Ethernet has become a standard in recording studios, concert halls, etc., thanks to protocols such as Dante, AVB, and more generally AES67. Audio over Ethernet solves many issues by allowing for the transmission of a large number of digital audio streams over fairly long distances in a standardized way. On the other hand, it introduces challenging issues like jitter and distributed clock synchronicity. While the aforementioned standards deal with these kinds of problems, they may be hard to deploy when audio diffusion is carried out using dedicated/custom hardware, such as an FPGA. This paper proposes a dedicated and simple protocol for transmitting Ethernet audio streams on a LAN to an FPGA acting as an audio DSP platform. This protocol, combined with the FPGA's ability to handle a large number of audio streams, provides a cost-effective way to deploy spatial audio systems. We demonstrate this protocol on a 32-speakers WFS system controlled by an AMD/Xilinx Zybo Z7 FPGA development board.