A PROGRAMMABLE WIRELESS SENSING SYSTEM FOR STRUCTURAL MONITORING, 2006
ABSTRACT
Recent work has examined the design of wireless sensor network (WSN) systems for structural health monitoring (SHM). Wireless sensors enable dense monitoring of large physical structures and promise enormous ease and flexibility of deployment of instrumentation, as well as low maintenance and deployment costs. However, programming sensing applications on a network of wireless sensors remains a difficult and time-consuming endeavor. This is due in part to the complexity of such systems. Their limited battery resources, and the highly variable performance of wireless communication in different environments represent significant constraints that, if each application developer were forced to deal with, can significantly increase the time to develop robust applications. We have been developing a networked software system called TENET that simplifies the programming of wireless sensor actuator systems. A TENET system is a two-tier networked system consisting of two classes of nodes: a higher-tier with several nodes containing 32-bit processors and IEEE 802.11b radios, and a lower-tier comprising battery-operated sensor nodes with less-capable processors, low-power radios. Our TENET software runs application code on the higher-tier nodes, and provides a generic interface for tasking sensors and actuators. This separation of functionality simplifies application development greatly, since developers can reuse networking and sensor data extraction code, thereby reducing application development time. We will report on the development of and experiences with structural data acquisition application for a long-span suspension bridge using TENET. We will report on our experiences in deploying a two-tier network of wireless sensors on the bridge. We will report on the performance of the TENET system in this setting as well.
– Jeongyeup Paek, Omprakash Gnawali, Ki-Young Jang, Daniel Nishimura Ramesh Govindan, John Caffrey, Mazen Wahbeh, and Sami Masri, “A Programmable Wireless Sensing System for Structural Monitoring,” Fourth World Conference on Structural Control and Monitoring (4WCSCM), July 2006.