PackTrix: From data packing to reconstruction for a sensor network based structural health monitoring system

Despite the fact that wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been applied to structural health monitoring (SHM) systems of civil infrastructure, the reliable data transmission is very challenging for structures far away from data center due to long transmission distance. In this paper, we present a novel architecture that high-speed train takes the role of a mobile sink to assist the data collection. In order to guarantee the recovery of monitoring data with high probability under unreliable transmission, a new data packing and reconstruction method called PackTrix is then proposed with Matrix Completion technique. It is proved that the proposed PackTrix algorithm is one of the optimal packing methods rendering the Matrix Completion technique effectiveness for data reconstruction. Theoretical analyses as well as simulations with real world data show that PackTrix can recover lost data with low relative error based on only very small percents of the original data.