Nowadays, more than half of the worldâ??s population lives in urban areas. Since this proportion is expected to keep rising, the\nsustainable development of cities is of paramount importance to guarantee the quality of life of their inhabitants. Environmental\nnoise is one of the main concerns that has to be addressed, due to its negative impact on the health of people. Different national\nand international noise directives and legislations have been defined during the past decades, which local authorities must comply\nwith involving noise mapping, action plans, policing, and public awareness, among others. To this aim, a recent change in the\nparadigm for environmental noise monitoring has been driven by the rise of Internet of Things technology within smart cities\nthrough the design and development of wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs). This work reviews the most relevant WASNbased\napproaches developed to date focused on environmental noise monitoring. The proposals have moved from networks\ncomposed of high-accuracy commercial devices to the those integrated by ad hoc low-cost acoustic sensors, sometimes designed\nas hybrid networks with low and high computational capacity nodes. After describing the main characteristics of recent WASNbased\nprojects, the paper also discusses several open challenges, such as the development of acoustic signal processing techniques\nto identify noise events, to allow the reliable and pervasive deployment of WASNs in urban areas together with some potential\nfuture applications.
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