Energy Efficiency is Not Enough:Towards a Batteryless Internet of Sounds

Abstract

This position paper advocates for digital sobriety in the design and usage of wireless acoustic sensors. As of today, these devices all rely on batteries, which are either recharged by a human operator or via solar panels. Yet, batteries contain chemical pollutants and have a shorter lifespan than electronic components: as such, they hinder the autonomy and sustainability of the Internet of Sounds at large. Against this problem, our radical answer is to avoid the use of batteries altogether; and instead, to harvest ambient energy in real time and store it in a supercapacitor allowing a few minutes of operation. We show the inherent limitations of battery-dependent technologies for acoustic sensing. Then, we describe how a low-cost Micro-Controller Unit (MCU) could serve for audio acquisition and feature extraction on the edge. In particular, we stress the advantage of storing intermediate computations in ferroelectric random-access memory (FeRAM), which is nonvolatile, fast, endurant and consumes little. As a proof of concept, we present a simple-minded detector of sine tones in background noise, which relies on a fixed-point implementation of the fast Fourier transform (FFT). We outline future directions towards bioacoustic event detection and urban acoustic monitoring without batteries nor wires.