Analysis of rate constraints for MWF-based noise reduction in acoustic sensor networks

Abstract

In an acoustic sensor network, consisting of spatially distributed microphone nodes, a significant noise reduction can be achieved using the centralized multi-channel Wiener filter (MWF), requiring all available microphone signals in the entire network. However the limited bandwidth of the communication link typically does not al low to transmit all microphone signals between the different nodes. Recently, a distributed node-specific MWF-based noise reduction scheme has been presented, where each node only transmits a filtered combination of its microphone signals. In this paper, the performance gain of the centralized MWF and the distributed node-specific MWF-based scheme are analyzed as a function of the available band width of the communication link.