Demonstration for Low Cost Wireless Smart Sensor Networks Based on ARM for Structural Health Monitoring

As a potential replacement of the traditional tethered system, wireless smart sensor networks (WSSNs) attract a lot of interests and have many applications, especially in civil engineering for structural health monitoring (SHM). However, many wireless sensor networks are based on some commercial wireless communication board and other sensor boards which need to be connected on it are expensive. Based on our previous research, this paper gives and demonstrates a proposal to make a low cost and low power wireless smart sensor using ARM Cortex™-M3 and some low cost and low power components. A new simple protocol is developed to realize reliable wireless communication between the gate way node (GWN) and the leaf node (LN) and an user interface on the PC client is also developed for displaying the measured results in real time.