Enabling Coverage-Preserving Scheduling in Wireless Sensor Networks for Structural Health Monitoring

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been considered to be the next generation paradigm of structural health monitoring (SHM) systems due to the low cost, high scalability and ease of deployment. Due to the intrinsically energy-intensive nature of the sensor nodes in SHM application, it is highly preferable that they can be divided into subsets and take turns to monitor the condition of a structure. This approach is generally called as 'coverage-preserving scheduling' and has been widely adopted in existing WSN applications. The problem of partitioning the nodes into subsets is generally called as the 'maximum lifetime coverage problem (MLCP)'. However, existing solutions to the MLCP cannot be directly applied to SHM application. As compared to other WSN applications, we cannot define a specific coverage area independently for each sensor node in SHM, which is however the basic assumption in all existing solutions to the MLCP. In this paper, we proposed two approaches to solve the MLCP in SHM. The performance of the methods is demonstrated through both extensive simulations and real experiments.