Abstract
Event-driven monitoring policies enable to significantly reduce the power consumption of wireless sensor networks by reducing the recording period to those time intervals that provide valuable data. The resulting longer operation lifetime increase discloses fields of application that require long monitoring periods. This paper presents a structural monitoring system that uses specialized sentinel nodes for detecting possibly heavy road vehicles and for alarming monitoring nodes, which are specialized on strain sensing. Heavy vehicles are identified by estimating nearly in real time height and length of vehicles of a traffic flow by processing data recorded from low-cost ultrasonic and magnetic displacement sensors. Field tests demonstrated that while height detection is very reliable, length detection is too imprecise to discriminate with high success rates between trucks and delivery vans.
Highlights
Structural monitoring is increasingly becoming an important tool for assessing existing civil structures since specific information about the state and performance of the structure enables to achieve a more effective and cost-optimized management of civil infrastructure [1]
Cost reduction can be achieved by optimizing the design of monitoring systems in terms of sensor placement, data quality, and minimal monitoring period
Wireless sensor networks are perfectly competitive to tethered monitoring systems for monitoring applications involving low data rates such as monitoring of slowly varying structural processes
Summary
Structural monitoring is increasingly becoming an important tool for assessing existing civil structures since specific information about the state and performance of the structure enables to achieve a more effective and cost-optimized management of civil infrastructure [1]. Wireless sensor networks are perfectly competitive to tethered monitoring systems for monitoring applications involving low data rates such as monitoring of slowly varying structural processes This is possible as the hardware has to be operated only periodically and for very short time laps. Permanent operation of sensing hardware contributes to power consumption Frequent maintenance activities such as battery replacements may nullify the cost advantages of WSN over tethered monitoring systems. This concept consists in restricting the monitoring period to those time intervals that provide valuable data Since outside these time intervals there is nothing interesting to monitor, the sensing hardware can be switched off and the sensor node can be set in a low-power sleep state.
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