Swift/iOS - How to compress audio so that it can be streamed to another device, then decompress and play the same audio

Question

I've been using the following methods to convert an AVAudioPCMBuffer to [UInt8] and then [UInt8] back to an AVAudioPCMBuffer. The problem is that every single conversion is a total of 17640 bytes, which to stream over MultipeerConnectivity is a lot. In fact, I think my stream ends up reading data slower than data is coming in, since if I end the stream on one device I can see that the other continues to read data until it realizes that the stream has ended.

Here is my conversion of AVAudioPCMBuffer to [UInt8]. Credit for this answer goes to Rhythmic Fistman from this answer.

func audioBufferToBytes(audioBuffer: AVAudioPCMBuffer) -> [UInt8] {
    let srcLeft = audioBuffer.floatChannelData![0]
    let bytesPerFrame = audioBuffer.format.streamDescription.pointee.mBytesPerFrame
    let numBytes = Int(bytesPerFrame * audioBuffer.frameLength)

    // initialize bytes by 0 
    var audioByteArray = [UInt8](repeating: 0, count: numBytes)

    srcLeft.withMemoryRebound(to: UInt8.self, capacity: numBytes) { srcByteData in
        audioByteArray.withUnsafeMutableBufferPointer {
            $0.baseAddress!.initialize(from: srcByteData, count: numBytes)
        }
    }

    return audioByteArray
}

And here is [UInt8] to AVAudioPCMBuffer

func bytesToAudioBuffer(_ buf: [UInt8]) -> AVAudioPCMBuffer {

    let fmt = AVAudioFormat(commonFormat: .pcmFormatFloat32, sampleRate: 8000, channels: 1, interleaved: false)
    let frameLength = UInt32(buf.count) / fmt.streamDescription.pointee.mBytesPerFrame

    let audioBuffer = AVAudioPCMBuffer(pcmFormat: fmt, frameCapacity: frameLength)
    audioBuffer.frameLength = frameLength

    let dstLeft = audioBuffer.floatChannelData![0]

    buf.withUnsafeBufferPointer {
        let src = UnsafeRawPointer($0.baseAddress!).bindMemory(to: Float.self, capacity: Int(frameLength))
        dstLeft.initialize(from: src, count: Int(frameLength))
    }

    return audioBuffer
}

Can anyone help me compress this data so that it is easier to send over a stream, and then decompress it so it can be played?