Saving energy in WSNs for acoustic surveillance applications while maintaining QoS

Abstract

Wireless acuusuc sensor networks (wasns) are a promising technology for performing acoustic surveillance because of their flexibility and low cost. However, their commercialization is nowadays limited due to their high energy consumption, which is mainly a result of the high data rates required to stream audio data between sensor nodes. In order to improve energy efficiency in WASNs, we explore the benefits of introducing capabilities to reconfigure and collaborate. More specifically we consider an application for localizing and recording sound events in a warehouse environment. For studying this, we introduce an energy consumption model for a WASN node, which includes the cost of sensing, processing and wireless communications. Presented results show that the centralized features allow important energy savings, while maintaining a sufficient Quality of Service. For the considered setup, our simulations show that a centralized approach saves 22% of energy. Furthermore, by using a smart activation of nodes, the energy consumed by all the nodes can be balanced, resulting in a longer network lifetime.