EnviroMic: Towards cooperative storage and retrieval in audio sensor networks

This paper presents EnviroMic, a novel distributed acoustic monitoring, storage, and trace retrieval system. Audio represents one of the least exploited modalities in sensor networks to date. The relatively high frequency and large size of audio traces motivate distributed algorithms for coordinating recording tasks, reducing redundancy of data stored by nearby sensors, filtering out silence, and balancing storage utilization in the network. Applications of acoustic monitoring with EnviroMic range from the study of mating rituals and social behavior of animals in the wild to audio surveillance of military targets. EnviroMic is designed for disconnected operation, where the luxury of having a basestation cannot be assumed. We implement the system on a TinyOS-based platform and systematically evaluate its performance through both indoor testbed experiments and a preliminary outdoor deployment. Results demonstrate up to a 4-fold improvement in effective storage capacity of the network compared to uncoordinated recording.