Wireless sensor networks for structural health monitoring : challenges and techniques

Abstract

WSNs have been regarded as a substitute for traditional wire-based structural health monitoring (SHM) systems due to the low cost, easy deployment and high scalability. Despite of the existing deployments of WSNs on various structures, using WSNs for SHM is still a challenging task and many related issues are yet to be fully addressed or even clearly identified. Particularly, advantages and limitations of associated techniques to address some issues have not been well recognized. In this paper. we first review the existing WSN-based SHM systems and then identify five some challenging issues when WSNs are used to monitor structural conditions. These challenges, ranging from energy consumption. Data delivery, to SHM algorithms and middleware framework, are mainly caused by the contradiction between the high requirements of SHM and resource-limited WSNs. Existing techniques to address these issues, along with their benefits and drawbacks, are also presented.