Evaluating Acoustic Data Transmission Schemes for Ad-Hoc Communication Between Nearby Smart Devices

2025-12-08

ACM Transactions on Internet of Things

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of systematic evaluation of acoustic communication schemes on real-world devices, as most existing approaches rely solely on simulations or small-scale tests. The authors reproduce three representative protocols and conduct over 11,000 real-world transmission experiments across eight smartphone models in both indoor and anechoic chamber environments. This effort yields the first large-scale empirical dataset for acoustic communication on commodity hardware, accompanied by fully open-sourced implementation code. The findings reveal that multipath effects and inter-device audio hardware heterogeneity critically undermine communication reliability, causing significant performance degradation for most existing methods under practical deployment conditions. These results provide an empirical foundation and a standardized benchmark for designing robust acoustic communication systems in Internet-of-Things applications.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Acoustic data transmission offers a compelling alternative to Bluetooth and NFC by leveraging the ubiquitous speakers and microphones in smartphones and IoT devices. However, most research in this field relies on simulations or limited on-device testing, which makes the real-world reliability of proposed schemes difficult to assess. We systematically reviewed 31 acoustic communication studies for commodity devices and found that none provided accessible source code. After contacting authors and re-implementing three promising schemes, we assembled a testbed of eight representative acoustic communication systems. Using over 11 000 smartphone transmissions in both realistic indoor environments and an anechoic chamber, we provide a systematic and repeatable methodology for evaluating the reliability and generalizability of these schemes under real-world conditions. Our results show that many existing schemes face challenges in practical usage, largely due to severe multipath propagation indoors and varying audio characteristics across device models. To support future research and foster more robust evaluations, we release our re-implementations alongside the first comprehensive dataset of real-world acoustic transmissions. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of rigorous on-device testing and underscore the need for robust design strategies to bridge the gap between simulation results and reliable IoT deployments.

Problem

• acoustic data transmission
• reliability
• real-world evaluation
• multipath propagation
• device heterogeneity

Innovation

• acoustic data transmission
• real-world evaluation
• multipath propagation
• IoT communication
• reproducible benchmark