TAWNS - A Terrestrial Acoustic and Wireless Network Simulation Framework

Wireless Sensor Networks that address audio-related applications have been researched for over a decade. But reproducibility and customizability are a challenge when focusing on research questions in outdoor environments (e.g., localization of wildlife species). It usually involved the design of customized prototypes and time-consuming and often error-prone deployments to generate a ground truth. In this paper, we propose TAWNS, an Open Source model framework for Omnet++/INET which supports researchers conducting simulations on wireless acoustic sensor networks - either as the main focus of study or as a component. It inherits all the networking and wireless communication elements supported by the library INET and provides a novel, easy-to-use spatial audio simulator for 3-D sound environments. For the latter, we adapted and extended the library Scaper by adding a customized model for attenuating and delaying the acoustic signals. Our model parameters are derived from multiple measurements with different hardware. We share them in this paper, serving as a basis for other researchers. To give an impression of the hardware requirements, we also evaluate the system resources of our simulator.