SenetSHM: Towards practical structural health monitoring using intelligent sensor networks

Due to low cost, high scalability and ease of deployment, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been considered a promising tool for structural health monitoring (SHM). Although many WSN-based SHM systems have been deployed, we notice that the design of many systems has deviated from the real requirements in SHM. For example, many systems focus on energy-efficiency, which is however not the requirements for many SHM applications where only a-few-hour data collection is required. A large portion of the existing systems strives to improve wireless throughput, which we believe, is not a viable approach for data-intensive SHM applications. On the other hand, some real requirements in SHM, such as high-frequency and synchronized sensing with real-time onboard data storage, fast, reliable and unified wakeup of sensor nodes in the presence of some events, and embedding efficient and effective SHM algorithms in resource-limited sensor nodes, etc., have not been fully addressed. In this paper, we designed a practical WSN-based platform called SenetSHM. SenetSHM leverages novel techniques to handle the above problems and can be configured for various SHM applications. We share our experiences by stepping from the hardware and software design of the SenetSHM.