A Distributed Audio Synchronization Scheme for Wireless Audio Sensor Networks

In Wireless Audio Sensor Networks (WASNs), many applications such as target tracking, data fusion and localization, often require precise synchronization among audio streams. Extensive researches have focused on the centralized control under the assumption that the cluster head is power supplied. However, the cluster head is usually battery-powered, especially in the wild environment. In this paper, we propose a distributed audio synchronization scheme which can share the task of the cluster head with all the reporting sensors. At the sensor, by dynamically detecting and marking the endpoint of the audio streams, we can determine the start point of the audio synchronization effectively with little effect of the interference in the communication. At the cluster head, by aligning and adjusting the marked endpoint, we synchronize the reported audio streams precisely. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme can synchronize the audio streams under different conditions with low energy cost.