Application-Oriented Sensor Network Architecture for Dependable Structural Health Monitoring

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being deployed for structural health monitoring (SHM) applications at an increasing rate. A WSN is often organized into groups or clusters for distributed monitoring purposes. However, we discover that the dependability (in terms of the monitoring ability/quality and low false alarm rate) is greatly affected by such grouping schemes, as they do not satisfy application-specific monitoring aspects. We present an SHM application oriented network architecture (SHMnet) and analyze health event monitoring performance with it. We propose a substructure-oriented sensor organization (SOSO), considering the formation of engineering structures and finding that a large physical structure consists of a number of substructures. We enable deployed sensors to be organized into groups (unlike dynamic clusters/trees) in such a way that each group of sensors can monitor a substructure independently. We evaluate SHMnet via simulations using real data traces. The evaluation results, compared to existing work, show that SHMnet achieves at least five times the energy saving (including the energy for communication) in WSNs and dependability in terms of high ability of monitoring and low false alarm rate.