Performing acoustic localization in a network of embedded smart sensors

Situation awareness is an important aspect of ubiquitous computer systems, as these systems of systems are highly integrated with the physical world and for successful operation they must maintain high awareness of the environment. Acoustic information is one of the most popular modalities, by which the environment states are estimated. Multi-sensor approaches also provide the possibility for acoustic source localization. This paper considers an acoustic localization system of dual channel smart sensors interconnected through a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The low computational power of smart sensor devices requires distribution of localization tasks among WSN nodes. The Initial Search Region Reduction (ISRR) method is used in the WSN to meet this requirement. ISRR, as opposed to conventional localization methods, performs significantly less complex computations and does not require exchange of raw signal between nodes. The system is implemented on smart dust motes utilizing Atmel ATmega128RFA1 processors with integrated 2.4GHz IEEE 802.15.4 compliant radio transceivers. The paper discusses complications introduced by low power hardware and ad-hoc networking, and also reviews conditions of real-time operation