Low Cost Wireless Sensor Network for Continuous Bridge monitoring

Continuous monitoring wireless sensor networks (WSN) are considered as one of the most promising means to harvest information from large structures in order to assist in structural health monitoring and management. At the same time, continuous monitoring WSNs suffer from limited network lifetimes, since they need to propagate large amounts of data over regular time intervals towards a single destination in the network. Propagation of information is done through multiple hops, suffering from collisions, retransmissions and therefore high energy consumption. Moreover, since there is a bottleneck effect around the network sink, all routing layer algorithms will always deplete the power of the last tier before the fusion center. Finally, theory shows that in such networks scalability could become an issue since transport capacity per node is severely affected as the number of nodes within the network increases. Therefore, in order for WSNs to be considered as an efficient tool to monitor the health state of large structures, their energy consumption should be reduced to a bare minimum. In this work we consider a couple of novel techniques for increasing the lifetime of the sensor network, related to both node and network architecture. Namely, we consider new node designs that are of low cost, low complexity, and low energy consumption. Moreover, we present a new network architecture for such small nodes, that would enable them to reach a base station at large distances from the network, with minimal energy.