Transducer Arrays Over A²B Networks in Industrial and Automotive Applications: Clock Propagation Measurements (original) (raw)

An Innovative Architecture of Full-Digital Microphone Arrays Over A²B Network for Consumer Electronics

IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics

Microphone arrays of various sizes and shapes are currently employed in consumer electronics devices such as speakerphones, smart TVs, smartphones, and headphones. In this paper, a full-digital, planar microphone array is presented. It makes use of digital Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) microphones, connected through the Automotive Audio Bus (A 2 B). A clock propagation model for A 2 B networks, developed in a previous work, was employed to estimate the effects of jitter and delay on microphone arrays. It will be shown that A 2 B allows for a robust data transmission, while ensuring deterministic latency and channels synchronization, thus overcoming the signal integrity issues which usually affect MEMS capsules. The microphone positioning is also discussed since it greatly affects the spatial accuracy of beamforming. Numerical simulations were performed on four regular geometries to identify the optimal layout in terms of number of capsules and beamforming directivity. An A 2 B planar array with equilateral triangle geometry and four microphones, three in the vertices and one in the center, was built. Experimental measurements were performed, obtaining an excellent matching with numerical simulations. Finally, the concept of an array of arrays (meta-array) is presented, designed by combining several triangular units and analyzed through numerical simulations. Index Terms-Automotive Audio Bus (A 2 B), automotive applications, beamforming, consumer products, digital MEMS microphones, meta-arrays, microphone arrays, planar arrays, spatial audio, triangular arrays. I. INTRODUCTION M ICROPHONE arrays are employed in consumer electronic devices for several applications, such as teleconferencing, speakerphone units, smartphones, and smart TVs. They are mainly used for dereverberation or echo reduction [1]-[4] and speech recognition [5]. Other consumer electronics applications may include Active Noise Control (ANC) [6], [7], multi-channel audio recording [8] and beamforming [9]. When designing such multichannel systems, the type of capsules and data

Latency in Audio Ethernet Networks

PREPRINTS-AUDIO ENGINEERING SOCIETY, 2003

In a time when several audio Ethernet networking solutions are being studied and developed, the analysis of the latency introduced by theses networks is fundamental. This analysis is the subject of the present paper, and is necessary not only to enable the identification of the factors that can be optimised, but also to support the decision about the possibility or not of the inclusion of in-band synchronism signalling.

Next-generation audio networking engineering for professional applications

2012

This paper presents an overview of the present and the future of audio networking and its needs, and focus on a light-weight generic architecture that we had experienced on multichannel spatial sound streamed to multiple recipients, in the context of 3D multimedia environment, and which should fit all the current and future requirements of professional audio applications.

Design of Noise Measurement Sensor Network: Networking and Communication Part

In this paper we report the design and implemen-tation of the networking and communication part of a WSN application for measuring industrial and residential acoustic noise. The network is formed in tree topology and a global synchronization is achieved. A link-state routing is tightly binded with the synchronization so that the network overhead is greatly reduced. Transmission scheduling is implemented in the network due to the fact that noise measuring is time-correlated, resource-consuming, and uninterruptible. The application is built on the CiNet cross-layer protocol stack. In our testbed, two IEEE 802.15.4 platforms (Chipcon CC2420 and Jennic JN5148) worked seamlessly. The uniqueness of this application is that it combines routing, global synchronization, and scheduling under a single framework. The network has been already deployed in the residential area of Kokkola city on the western coast of Finland.

Instrumentation Synchonization Techniques for Large Microphone Arrays

Journal of The Acoustical Society of America, 2008

Acoustics 08 Paris different systems or synchronize systems together with precise timing. Signal Based and Time Based are the two basic methods of synchronizing instrumentation. In Signal Based synchronization, clocks and triggers are physically connected and routed between systems. This provides the highest precision synchronization and is well developed. For some applications, size and distance constrains physically connecting the systems needed for making measurements though the inter-channel phase information of simultaneously sampled signals is crucial. In Time Based synchronization, system components have a common reference of what time it is. Events, triggers and clocks can be generated based on this time. This is an overview of how a variety of time references including GPS, IEEE-1588, and IRIG-B can be used to correlate and synchronize measurements anywhere in the world with precision with and without a direct connection between the measurement systems. The level of precision of the variety of methods that can be used for time-stamping, generating a trigger at a user specified time as well as synchronizing multiple instrumentation types is covered.

Best Practices in Network Audio - AES WHITE PAPER

J. Audio Eng. Soc, 2009

Analog audio needs a separate physical circuit for each channel. Each microphone in a studio or on a stage, for example, must have its own circuit back to the mixer. Routing of the signals is inflexible. Digital audio is frequently wired in a similar way to analog. Although several channels can share a single physical circuit (e.g., up to 64 with AES10), thus reducing the number of cores needed in a cable. Routing of signals is still inflexible and any change to the equipment in a location is liable to require new cabling. Networks allow much more flexibility. Any piece of equipment plugged into the network is able to communicate with any other. However, installers of audio networks need to be aware of a number of issues that affect audio signals but are not important for data networks and are not addressed by current IT networking technologies such as IP. This white paper examines these issues and provides guidance to installers and users that can help them build successful networked systems.

A Unifying Standard for Interfacing Transducers to Networks - IEEE-1451.0

2005

A committee of industry and government technology experts has completed a three-year effort to develop a set of specifications that consist of a unifying set of functions, communications protocols, a common set of commands, and electronic data sheet formats that will serve as the basis for all future IEEE 1451 smart transducer interface standards. This paper will highlight the key features of the proposed IEEE P1451.0 standard and describe how these features are being used in applications, and how they are beneficial to users in achieving data-level interoperability where multiple wired and wireless sensor networks are connected.

Flexilink: A unified low latency network architecture for multichannel live audio

Audio Engineering Society (Convention Paper), 2012

The networking of live audio for professional applications typically uses layer 2 based solutions such as AES50 [1] and MADI utilising fixed time slots similar to Time Division Multiplexing (TDM). However, these solutions are not effective for best effort traffic where data traffic utilises available bandwidth and is consequently subject to variations in QoS. There are audio networking methods such as AES47 which is based on asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), but ATM equipment is rarely available. Audio can also be sent over Internet Protocol (IP), but the size of the packet headers and the difficulty of keeping latency within acceptable limits make it unsuitable for many applications. In this paper, we propose a new unified low latency network architecture that supports both time deterministic and best effort traffic towards full bandwidth utilisation with high performance routing/switching. For live audio, this network architecture allows low latency as well as the flexibility to support multiplexing multiple channels with different sampling rates and word lengths.

GNSS-based Sound Card Synchronization

2019 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems (FedCSIS), 2019

Audio communication on the public Internet suffers from not synchronized word clocks of the involved audio devices. The resulting clock drift leads to audio dropouts, which is typically compensated by a sample rate conversion (SRC) in standard telecommunication systems. This, however, does not fulfill the requirements of a high-quality audio system, in which all devices share one and the same word clock. Professional IP based network audio systems such as DANTE or AVB with their respective clock synchronization techniques have so been limited to LAN usage, where network jitter and loss have negligible importance regarding the required accuracy in the dimension of several nanoseconds. In a WAN, however, jitter in the millisecond dimension would lead to unacceptable measurement errors for the intended clock synchronization. As a consequence, we decided to investigate alternative clock synchronization techniques for WAN-distributed devices and developed a GNSS-based approach, which lea...

AES White Paper: Best Practices in Network Audio

Analog audio needs a separate physical circuit for each channel. Each microphone in a studio or on a stage, for example, must have its own circuit back to the mixer. Routing of the signals is inflexible. Digital audio is frequently wired in a similar way to analog. Although several channels can share a single physical circuit (e.g., up to 64 with AES10), thus reducing the number of cores needed in a cable. Routing of signals is still inflexible and any change to the equipment in a location is liable to require new cabling. Networks allow much more flexibility. Any piece of equipment plugged into the network is able to communicate with any other. However, installers of audio networks need to be aware of a number of issues that affect audio signals but are not important for data networks and are not addressed by current IT networking technologies such as IP. This white paper examines these issues and provides guidance to installers and users that can help them build successful networked systems.