On Sampling and Coding for Distributed Acoustic Sensing

The issue of how to efficiently represent the data collected by a network of microphones recording spatio-temporal acoustic wave fields is addressed. Each sensor node in the network samples the sound field, quantizes the samples and transmits the encoded samples to some central unit, which computes an estimate of the original sound field based on the information received from all the microphones. Our analysis is based on the spectral properties of the sound field, which are induced by the physics of wave propagation and have a significant impact on the efficiency of the chosen sampling lattice and coding scheme. As field acquisition by a sensor network typically implies spatio-temporal sampling of the field, a multidimensional sampling theorem for homogeneous random fields with compactly supported spectral measures is proved. To assess the loss of information implied by source coding, rate distortion functions for various coding schemes and sampling lattices are determined. In particular, centralized coding, independent coding and some multiterminal schemes are compared. Under the assumption of spectral whiteness of the sound field, it is shown that sampling with a quincunx lattice followed by independent coding is optimal as it achieves the lower bound given by centralized coding

Green compressive sampling reconstruction in IoT networks

In this paper, we address the problem of green Compressed Sensing (CS) reconstruction within Internet of Things (IoT) networks, both in terms of computing architecture and reconstruction algorithms. The approach is novel since, unlike most of the literature dealing with energy efficient gathering of the CS measurements, we focus on the energy efficiency of the signal reconstruction stage given the CS measurements. As a first novel contribution, we present an analysis of the energy consumption within the IoT network under two computing architectures. In the first one, reconstruction takes place within the IoT network and the reconstructed data are encoded and transmitted out of the IoT network; in the second one, all the CS measurements are forwarded to off-network devices for reconstruction and storage, i.e., reconstruction is off-loaded. Our analysis shows that the two architectures significantly differ in terms of consumed energy, and it outlines a theoretically motivated criterion to select a green CS reconstruction computing architecture. Specifically, we present a suitable decision function to determine which architecture outperforms the other in terms of energy efficiency. The presented decision function depends on a few IoT network features, such as the network size, the sink connectivity, and other systems’ parameters. As a second novel contribution, we show how to overcome classical performance comparison of different CS reconstruction algorithms usually carried out w.r.t. the achieved accuracy. Specifically, we consider the consumed energy and analyze the energy vs. accuracy trade-off. The herein presented approach, jointly considering signal processing and IoT network issues, is a relevant contribution for designing green compressive sampling architectures in IoT networks

Data Transmission with Reduced Delay for Distributed Acoustic Sensors

This paper proposes a channel access control scheme fit to dense acoustic sensor nodes in a sensor network. In the considered scenario, multiple acoustic sensor nodes within communication range of a cluster head are grouped into clusters. Acoustic sensor nodes in a cluster detect acoustic signals and convert them into electric signals (packets). Detection by acoustic sensors can be executed periodically or randomly and random detection by acoustic sensors is event driven. As a result, each acoustic sensor generates their packets (50bytes each) periodically or randomly over short time intervals (400ms~4seconds) and transmits directly to a cluster head (coordinator node). Our approach proposes to use a slotted carrier sense multiple access. All acoustic sensor nodes in a cluster are allocated to time slots and the number of allocated sensor nodes to each time slot is uniform. All sensor nodes allocated to a time slot listen for packet transmission from the beginning of the time slot for a duration proportional to their priority. The first node that detect the channel to be free for its whole window is allowed to transmit. The order of packet transmissions with the acoustic sensor nodes in the time slot is autonomously adjusted according to the history of packet transmissions in the time slot. In simulations, performances of the proposed scheme are demonstrated by the comparisons with other low rate wireless channel access schemes.Comment: Accepted to IJDSN, final preprinted versio

Proceedings of the second "international Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST'14)

The implicit objective of the biennial "international - Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST) is to foster collaboration between international scientific teams by disseminating ideas through both specific oral/poster presentations and free discussions. For its second edition, the iTWIST workshop took place in the medieval and picturesque town of Namur in Belgium, from Wednesday August 27th till Friday August 29th, 2014. The workshop was conveniently located in "The Arsenal" building within walking distance of both hotels and town center. iTWIST'14 has gathered about 70 international participants and has featured 9 invited talks, 10 oral presentations, and 14 posters on the following themes, all related to the theory, application and generalization of the "sparsity paradigm": Sparsity-driven data sensing and processing; Union of low dimensional subspaces; Beyond linear and convex inverse problem; Matrix/manifold/graph sensing/processing; Blind inverse problems and dictionary learning; Sparsity and computational neuroscience; Information theory, geometry and randomness; Complexity/accuracy tradeoffs in numerical methods; Sparsity? What's next?; Sparse machine learning and inference.Comment: 69 pages, 24 extended abstracts, iTWIST'14 website: http://sites.google.com/site/itwist1

Development of universal software radio peripheral amplifier for underwater acoustic platform using software defined radio

First and foremost, the development of a modem using the USRP has applications in oceanographic monitoring and communication. Improved acoustic connecting would allow more efficient transfer of information between Underwater Acoustic (UWA) equipment such as autonomous vehicles, piloted vehicles, and underwater profilers. Therefore it can easily be modified in order to be employed for the testing of different UWA. This project describes the full system of an underwater acoustic modem with underwater wireless connection starting with the most critical component of the system which is the USRP amplifier for the receiver and the transceiver. In this project we focused on the development of the USRP amplifier. This amplifier is expected to enhance the signal of the transceiver to Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) modem and the GNU radio. The platform that we proposed uses the Software Defined Radio (SDR) as the main controller. This is due to its flexibility in modulation and able to support coding. Since this is an initial stage, in this work we only use Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying (GMSK) as the modulation techniques. The performance of the UWA platform had been tested and we found that as the frequency increases the attenuation increased as well but with the USRP amplifier we have managed to decrease it. UWA communication research will benefit greatly from the adaption of the USRP as an underwater acoustic modem. The USRP amplifier amplifies the signal that has send by the transceiver and detected by the receiver will effectively demodulate the signal and analyze the received data in the USRP modem. GNU radio and USRP SDR has been successfully implemented. The results demonstrate that the objectives of this research are archived. It is proved that by implementing GNU radio and USRP SDR in the new generation of underwater acoustic communication technology, and improves the utilization of the underwater communication. We conclude that the proper design of the USRP Amplifier is crucial to obtain high quality performance. This project has successfully developed a USRP amplifier and the underwater acoustic communication testbed with expected results