Source traffic modelling in WSN for acoustic sensing in reverberant environment

Abstract

Recent research efforts show that Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for acoustic sensing have the potential for ubiquitous sensing. The key challenge in delivering such WSN architecture is the trade-off between the cost of wireless sensors and acoustic analysis complexity. In this paper, we are proposing a source traffic modelling considering a system in which sensors are connected to a cloud based processing service. Acoustic sensing in practice generates great amount of traffic, and therefore a new model of sensing in a reverberant environment is necessary for better understanding of traffic nature and its volume. To lower the sensor cost, we have considered low-complexity acoustic event detection on the sensor side for preventing unnecessary traffic. The proposed acoustic sensor acts like a noise gate. Sound propagation in reverberant environment is modelled using the modified Image-Source Modelling (ISM) method. The source traffic model is validated in Matlab simulation and in real reverberant environment. Results show an example of bandwidth used by a simple acoustic sensor.