Design, testing, and implementation of WiSeMote: A wireless sensor network for structural health monitoring

Abstract

Much research has been done toward the realization of wireless sensor networks (WSN's) that can detect damage by aggregating information in a distributed manner from civil structures. These networks are still bound by system limitations such as limited battery power, low processor speeds, and limited radio transmission throughput. While many systems have been presented that have the ability to practically perform damage detection with their limited resources, there still exists room for improvement in power consumption, noise immunity, and utilization of network resources. This research presents the WiSeMote: a new wireless sensor node and base station that improves upon the power consumption and noise immunity of existing systems. Performance characterization test results are shown for communication, time synchronization, noise immunity, and data quality. Furthermore, this research takes an existing strategy for damage detection and analyzes it from the perspective of our new sensor platform. This new strategy is also implemented on the WiSeMote in a more resource efficient manner. Improvements in power consumption, external memory usage, and processing time are made possible through a novel parallel processing strategy for real-time calculation.