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Review of Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks for Environmental Noise Monitoring in Smart Cities

Nowadays, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. Since this proportion is expected to keep rising, the sustainable development of cities is of paramount importance to guarantee the quality of life of their inhabitants. Environmental noise is one of the main concerns that has to be addressed, due to its negative impact on the health of people. Different national and international noise directives and legislations have been defined during the past decades, which local authorities must comply with involving noise mapping, action plans, policing, and public awareness, among others. To this aim, a recent change in the paradigm for environmental noise monitoring has been driven by the rise of Internet of Things technology within smart cities through the design and development of wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs). This work reviews the most relevant WASN-based approaches developed to date focused on environmental noise monitoring. The proposals have moved from networks composed of high-accuracy commercial devices to the those integrated by ad hoc low-cost acoustic sensors, sometimes designed as hybrid networks with low and high computational capacity nodes. After describing the main characteristics of recent WASN-based projects, the paper also discusses several open challenges, such as the development of acoustic signal processing techniques to identify noise events, to allow the reliable and pervasive deployment of WASNs in urban areas together with some potential future applications.