Steerable distributed large-aperture audio array using low-power wireless acoustic sensor nodes

Abstract

Recent advancements in low-power wireless communication technologies allow for rapid deployable embedded monitoring applications with a deployment lifetime of several weeks of months. In this work, we present a work-in-progress wireless audio streaming solution that uses a network of small wireless microphone arrays to form a distributed steerable large-aperture array. To keep the application's communication bandwidth requirements manageable, we use a hierarchical data fusion algorithm that allows for delay-and-sum style beamforming to be carried out in-network, streaming the audio data along a routing tree to a base station. With the proposed distributed beamforming approach, it is sufficient to communicate as few as log(n) data streams for a network of n sensors, which is a significant reduction from a centralized approach that would require all n streams to be routed to the base station. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.