Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

3-2018

Abstract

The feasibility of using vibration energy harvesting (VEH) as an energy-efficient receiver for short-range acoustic data communication has been investigated recently. When data was encoded in acoustic signal within the energy harvesting frequency band and transmitted through a speaker, a VEH receiver was capable of decoding the data by processing the harvested energy signal. Although previous work created new opportunities for simultaneous energy harvesting and communication using the same hardware, the communication makes annoying sounds as the energy harvesting frequency band lies within the sensitive region of human auditory system. In this work, we present a novel modulation scheme to completely hide all communications within background music sound. The proposed modulation exploits sound masking theory to maximize signal to noise ratio of data communication without being audible to the music listener. We capitalize on the existence of repetitive sound patterns within popular music to realize synchronization between the transmitter and the receiver. We implement the proposed modulation within multiple hit songs and demonstrate its efficacy using a real VEH prototype made from off-the-shelf hardware. A user study involving 30 subjects confirms that the proposed modulation can completely hide VEH-based data communication from human perception while achieving up to 14 bps data rate, which is sufficient to transmit short codes or coupons of practical use.

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Digital Communications and Networking

Research Areas

Intelligent Systems and Optimization

Publication

Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, Athens, Greece, March 19-23

First Page

1

Last Page

10

ISBN

9781538632246

Identifier

10.1109/percom.2018.8444595

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Greece

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