Design of a new wireless data acquisition system for civil structural monitoring

Abstract

Traditional civil structure wired monitoring systems suffer complicated wiring, high cost, poor flexibility, and available wireless sensors network (WSN)-based wireless monitoring systems are inconvenient to access the internet. In this paper, based on the 6LoWPAN means: IPv6 low-power wireless personal area network WSN, a new wireless data acquisition system is proposed for structural monitoring applications, which consists of data acquisition nodes, a border node and a remote monitoring centre. The hardware design of the wireless data acquisition system is based on the CC2538 wireless transceiver, and inertial sensors and temperature and humidity sensors are integrated. Based on the Contiki-3.0 embedded operating system, the embedded application software of 6LoWPAN data acquisition nodes and border router nodes are designed. The remote monitoring centre of structural monitoring system is developed using the graphical user interface development environment (GUIDE) tool of the MATLAB software. Experimental testing results show that the system is stable and reliable and can realise interconnection between 6LoWPAN network and traditional IPv4 network. Moreover, the network performance is satisfactory. Therefore, the proposed wireless structural monitoring system has a good practical engineering application value.