Structural Health Monitoring Using Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are emerging as sensing paradigms that the structural engineering field has begun to consider as substitutes for traditional tethered structural health monitoring (SHM) systems for its low cost, easy of deployment, and high scalability. Recent years have witnessed large advancement in WSN-based SHM systems. However, practical limitations of WSNs, particularly in terms of power supply, wireless communication, and computational capability of wireless nodes, still remain to be roadblocks of realizing practical WSN-based SHM systems. This chapter is intended to serve as a summary review of the recent advances of using wireless sensor nodes for structural health monitoring. Instead of listing the hardware prototypes and software design of existing WSN-based SHM systems, the main challenges of using WSNs for SHM are identified first and then the corresponding techniques are summarized.