A distributed adaptive wave field synthesis system

The conventional wave field synthesis (WFS) theory is based on the free field assumption and the performance of systems based on it deteriorates significantly in reverberant environments. By introducing an error microphone array to monitor reproduction errors, the adaptive WFS (AWFS) system adjusts the loudspeaker signals to correct the sound field in reverberant environments. The AWFS system utilizes a centralized control strategy with a single processor, which imposes a high computational burden on the processor due to global error estimation, limiting the application scale. To address this issue, this paper proposes a distributed AWFS (DAWFS) system for an acoustic sensor and actuator network using a distributed signal processing strategy. Simulation results in a rectangular room demonstrate that the proposed DAWFS system can achieve comparable sound reproduction performance to the conventional AWFS system, both at the near-field error microphone array and in the target listening area. A global computational complexity analysis shows that the proposed DAWFS system exhibits significantly lower computational complexity than existing AWFS systems in various application scenarios, especially for massive channel systems. The results further demonstrate the potential applicability of the proposed DAWFS system in realistic reverberant environments.