W-TREMORS, a wireless monitoring system for earthquake engineering

Wireless Sensor Network is an emerging technology which can significantly reduce the cost and the time needed to monitor the conditions of civil structures. This work presents W-TREMORS, a new wireless sensing system for high-frequency distributed data acquisition. Our sensor network is based on the low-power and low-data rate standard IEEE 802.15.4, and we used inexpensive hardware. Nevertheless, the system meets requirements imposed by Structural Health Monitoring applications thanks to an efficient use of hardware resources and adopting a novel communication protocol which optimize bandwidth utilization. In addition, we developed a complete software architecture to integrate the Wireless Sensor Network with an existing measurement system. Our prototype WSN was tested through shaking tests in a controlled environment to validate the approach, and to identify problems which should be addressed before using the system on real-world buildings. Preliminary results show that our solution can effectively monitor seismic events providing high reliability and good performances.