Wireless Sensor Networks for Structural Health Monitoring: Considerations for communication protocol design

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems have been used with many important structures to enhance the public safety and to reduce the economical losses. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is an emerging technology which can be deployed with SHM applications. However, some system requirements have been overlooked in the current WSN designs for SHM applications. Therefore a complete analysis in system requirements is needed for WSN for SHM. In this paper, the system requirements posed by SHM applications are considered to assess potential candidates for the protocols in WSN for SHM. Based on that, we show that none of the commonly available protocols satisfy all the requirements associated with SHM systems. Hence, it is necessary to modify the existing protocols or design an entirely new protocol to completely satisfy the requirements of WSN for SHM application.