Distributed audio sensing with homeostasis-inspired autonomous communication

Abstract

Emerging applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN) requiring wide-band event signal communication such as multimedia surveillance sensor networks impose additional challenges including high communication bandwidth requirement and energy cost. Besides their partially or fully dependency on feedback messages from sink node, the existing protocols designed for WSN do not address the communication of wide-band event signals. Furthermore, the feedback messages may not reach in time to provide reliable communication of event information and save scarce network resources. Therefore, an autonomous communication protocol is imperative in order to provide wide-band event signal communication without any feedback from the sink. In nature, biological systems have self-organization capability, i.e., homeostasis, as they autonomously maintain a relatively stable equilibrium state for operation of vital functions. Hence, this natural phenomenon clearly gives promising inspirations in order to develop autonomous and efficient communication models and protocols for WSN domain. In this paper, the homeostasis-inspired autonomous communication (HAC) protocol is introduced for wireless audio sensor networks (WASN). Using the spectral properties of the wide-band event signal, i.e., audio signal, HAC enables WASN to maintain a relatively stable state in which sensor nodes reliably and energy-efficiently communicate the event signal to the sink node. Furthermore, with its self-organization capability, HAC does not rely on any feedback message from the sink node. Performance evaluations reveal that HAC successfully communicates wide-band event signal with minimum energy expenditure.