On the feasibility of personal audio systems over a network of distributed loudspeakers

Personal audio reproduction systems deal with the creation of personal sound zones within a room without the necessity of using headphones. These systems use an array of loudspeakers and design the required filters at each loudspeaker in order to render the desired audio signal to each person in the room as free of interferences as possible. There are very interesting proposals in the literature that make use of circular or linear arrays, but in this paper we study the problem considering a network of distributed loudspeakers controlled by a set of acoustic nodes, which can exchange information through a network. We state the model of such a distributed system by considering the electro-acoustic paths between the loudspeakers and each microphone, and try to provide a minimum signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) to each zone, but constraining the emitted power of the loudspeakers to a maximum value (avoiding annoying feedback effects). We make use of optimization techniques to decide if, given a distribution of the loudspeakers and a location of the personal sound zones within the room, the system will be feasible. Simulations are done to support the use of the proposed optimization techniques.