Audio-on-demand over wireless sensor networks

Audio represents one of the most appealing yet least exploited modalities in wireless sensor networks, due to the potentially extremely large data volumes and limited wireless capacity. Therefore, how to effectively collect audio sensing information remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm of audio information collection based on the concept of audio-on-demand. We consider a sink-free environment targeting for disaster management, where audio chunks are stored inside the network for retrieval. The difficulty is to guarantee a high search success rate without infrastructure support. To solve the problem, we design a novel replication algorithm that deploys an optimal number of O(vn) replicas across the sensor network. We prove the optimality of the energy consumption of the algorithm, and use real testbed experiments and extensive simulations to evaluate the performance and efficiency of our design. The experimental results show that our design can provide satisfactory quality of audio-on-demand service with short startup latency and slight playback jitter. Extensive simulation results show that this design achieves a search success rate of 98% while reducing the search energy consumption by an order of magnitude compared with existing schemes.