Scalable Acoustic IoT through Composable Distributed Beamforming Tags

With the proliferation of smart acoustic devices in everyday environments, low-power acoustic tags offer a promising choice for IoT applications. However, their highly limited operational range, throughput, and energy efficiency significantly restrict their viability for practical applications. In this work, we propose a first-of-its-kind distributed acoustic system called Disco. It consists of several low-power acoustic tags that can be flexibly composed on-demand to create an aperture array capable of distributed beamforming. The innovation of Disco lies in creating a ‘virtual’ distributed 2-speaker system that serves to wirelessly synchronize and enable distributed temporal beamforming at the tags independently. The low-power tags of Disco are prototyped with simple acoustic and analog-digital elements to create arrays comprising up to 8 tags. The beamforming performance of Disco scales with the number of tags in the array, delivering a multiple-fold increase in range, throughput, and energy efficiency. This advancement brings acoustic IoT applications closer to practical implementation.