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

This record contains the replication package for the paper "Evaluating Acoustic Data Transmission Schemes for Ad-Hoc Communication Between Nearby Smart Devices" by Florentin Putz, Philipp Fortmann, Jan Frank, Christoph Haugwitz, Mario Kupnik, and Matthias Hollick in ACM Transactions on Internet of Things (TIOT), 2025.

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 11000 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.

Replication Package:

Our replication package consists of:

• three re-implementations of acoustic communication schemes,
• our measurement dataset of 11900 WAV files with recorded smartphone transmissions from eight acoustic communication schemes,
• a CSV file with our raw data, including the BER for each scheme's recordings,
• our reproducible MATLAB analysis code to generate this CSV file by decoding the recordings from different schemes in parallel, and
• an R Markdown file to reproduce all result figures in our paper.

Please refer to the README.md file and our paper for further details. The paper contains a Methodological Transparency & Reproducibility Appendix  (META) containing detailed descriptions of our experimental setup, including the exact settings for transmission and reception.

Acknowledgments:

This work has been funded by the LOEWE initiative (Hesse, Germany) within the emergenCITY center [LOEWE/1/12/519/03/05.001(0016)/72].