A Distributed Voronoi-based Acoustic Source Localization Method With Wireless Sensor Networks

With the increasing development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), a large number of traditional applications get the opportunity to merge with it, acoustic source localization is one of the representatives. Based on TO A, TDOA, AOA or RSSI, series of acoustic source localization schemes have been proposed in recent years, especially those based on range-free methods.The existing acoustic source localization schemes are facing the following questions:(1) TOA-based and TDOA-based solutions require strict time synchronization between sensor nodes, which is unrealistic for large wireless sensor networks; (2) Centralized acoustic source localization schemes need a high communication cost to gather information from each node, which is too energy-consuming; (3) Most of schemes are short of portability and scalability, the system availability and reliability are also very big challenges for real world conditions. This paper proposed a distributed Voronoi-based acoustic source localization scheme using wireless sensor networks. First, DiVA uses range-free pairwise comparisons of sound detection timestamps between Local Voronoi Neighbors (LVN) to identify the node closest to the acoustic source, which then estimates the source’s location using a constrained TDOA-based method.Through simulation and experimental evaluations, DiVA is shown to be more accurate than TOA-based, TDOA-based method and DSL series. At the same time, DiVA is more robust and stable. DiVA can achieve centimeter-level localization error in an ideal indoor environment from our experiment. Even in a more complex outdoor environment, DiVA still perform well, which demonstrating that DiVA is robust and reliable in real world conditions.