Distributed Acoustic Beamforming with Blockchain Protection

Speech is a natural user interface for the Internet of Things system. However, the presence of noise affects severely the performance of such system. With the deployment of smart devices with microphones, one can form a powerful acoustic sensor network to enhance the speech via beamforming techniques. On the other hand, reliability of data transmission also determines the beamforming performance, since faulty data will drift the beamformer steering location randomly. Currently, there is no protection scheme for acoustic data transmitted over the wireless network in order to keep steady beamforming performance. In this article, we design a compound distributed beamformer, where nodes are grouped and the system is embedded with blockchain technology to protect the data integrity during transmission. It attempts to provide more possible reliable connections between groups. Simulated experiments show that the distributed beamformer with blockchain protection is able to maintain steady beamforming performance.