Acoustic Software Defined Platform: A Versatile Sensing and General Benchmarking Platform

Acoustic sensing has attracted significant attention recently, thanks to the pervasive availability of device support. However, adopting consumer-grade devices (e.g., smartphones) to deploy acoustic sensing applications faces the challenge of device/OS heterogeneity. Researchers have to pay tremendous efforts in tackling platform-dependent details even in simply accessing raw audio samples, thus losing focus on innovating sensing algorithms. To this end, this paper presents the first Acoustic Software Defined Platform (ASDP): a versatile sensing and general benchmarking platform. ASDP encompasses several customized acoustic modules running on a ubiquitous computing board, backed by a dedicated software framework. It is superior to commodity devices in controlling and reconfiguring physical layer settings, thus offering much better usability. The tailored software framework abstracts platform details and provides user-friendly interface for fast prototyping, while maintaining adequate programmability. To demonstrate the usefulness of ASDP, we showcase several relevant applications based on it. The promising outcomes make us believe that the release of our ASDP could greatly advance acoustic sensing research.