Development of a Wireless Communication System for Reliable Acoustic Data Collection Toward Anomaly Detection in Mechanical Equipment

With the recent proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that can send and receive data via wireless communication, we are able to monitor and operate these devices remotely. An example of an IoT system using wireless communication is a system for anomaly detection in mechanical equipment using acoustic data. In order to detect anomalies using acoustic data, continuous recording is essential, thereby increasing the data size. Although Wi-Fi networks provide high-capacity data transfer, performance degradation cannot be avoided due to reasons such as packet losses caused by collisions with data from other devices using the same frequency and the increase in distance between two communicating devices. In the present study, we developed a wireless communication system for reliable acoustic data collection for anomaly detection in mechanical equipment. First, as preliminary experiments, we investigated the communication characteristics for the transmission of large-size data by Wi-Fi in indoor and outdoor environments. The results indicated the communication performance was insufficient for transferring all recorded data handled by this system. Therefore, we developed a simple heuristic transmission timing control method and a method that can reduce the amount of transmission data in order to realize a stable acoustic data collection system. Finally, through demonstration experiments using mechanical equipment in the field, we verified the feasibility of the acoustic data collection system.