Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks for Structure Monitoring

Structural monitoring is the collection and analysis of structural response to ambient or forced excitation. One key issue in such monitoring is data aggregation. The sensors are typically sampled at high frequencies, producing large amounts of data; limited network resources make acquiring and processing this data quite challenging. In this paper, we propose an novel data aggregation scheme in WSNs for Structure Monitoring. In scheme, the interesting nodes can autonomously discover each other in a distributed fashion and form an ad hoc aggregation structure that can be used to compute cumulants and moments, or other statistical summaries. Simulation results show that the data size is reduced by a factor of 30 depending on the scheme in the aggregation.