  Smart sensing is expected to become a pervasive technology in smart cities
and environments of the near future. These services are improving their
capabilities due to integrated devices shrinking in size while maintaining
their computational power, which can run diverse Machine Learning algorithms
and achieve high performance in various data-processing tasks. One attractive
sensor modality to be used for smart sensing are acoustic sensors, which can
convey highly informative data while keeping a moderate energy consumption.
Unfortunately, the energy budget of current wireless sensor networks is usually
not enough to support the requirements of standard microphones. Therefore,
energy efficiency needs to be increased at all layers --- sensing, signal
processing and communication --- in order to bring wireless smart acoustic
sensors into the market. To help to attain this goal, this paper introduces
WASN-EM: an energy consumption model for wireless acoustic sensors networks
(WASN), whose aim is to aid in the development of novel techniques to increase
the energy-efficient of smart wireless acoustic sensors. This model provides a
first step of exploration prior to custom design of a smart wireless acoustic
sensor, and also can be used to compare the energy consumption of different
protocols.
