Lightning: a fast and lightweight acoustic localization protocol using low-end wireless micro-sensors

Acoustic awareness is an important service in ubiquitous computing environments. This paper presents a fast lightweight acoustic event localization protocol, the Lightning protocol, to locate impulsive sound sources using arrays of wireless micro-sensors. This protocol utilizes domain-invariant knowledge of acoustic and electromagnetic wave propagation to efficiently reduce the number of contending sensors in the localization process. It incurs O(1) transmissions irrespective of the sensor density and guarantees O(1) time delay in localization. Experiment results using UC Berkeley Motes demonstrate that the time delay for Lightning Protocol to locate hand clap sounds is in terms of milliseconds.