Infrastructure-free, Deep Learned Urban Noise Monitoring at ~100mW

Abstract

The Sounds of New York City (SONYC) wireless sensor network (WSN) has been fielded in Manhattan and Brooklyn over the past five years, as part of a larger human-in-the-loop cyber-physical control system for monitoring, analyzing, and mitigating urban noise pollution. We describe the evolution of the 2-tier SONYC WSN from an acoustic data collection fabric into a 3-tier in situ noise complaint monitoring WSN, and its current evaluation. The added tier consists of long range (LoRa), multi-hop networks of a new low-power acoustic mote, MKII (“Mach 2”), that we have designed and fabricated. MKII motes are notable in three ways: First, they advance machine learning capability at mote-scale in this application domain by introducing a real-time Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based embedding model that is competitive with alternatives while also requiring 10x lesser training data and ~2 orders of magnitude fewer runtime resources. Second, they are conveniently deployed relatively far from higher-tier base station nodes without assuming power or network infrastructure support at operationally relevant sites (such as construction zones), yielding a relatively low-cost solution. And third, their networking is frequency agile, unlike conventional LoRa networks: it tolerates in a distributed, self-stabilizing way the variable external interfer-ence and link fading in the cluttered 902-928MHz ISM band urban environment by dynamically choosing good frequencies using an efficient new method that combines passive and active measure-ments.