A versatile software architecture for civil structure monitoring with wireless sensor networks

Structural health monitoring with wireless sensor networks has received much attention in recent years due to the ease of sensor installation and low deployment and maintenance costs. However, sensor network technology needs to solve numerous challenges in order to substitute conventional systems: large amounts of data, remote configuration of measurement parameters, on-site calibration of sensors and robust networking functionality for long-term deployments. We present a structural health monitoring network that addresses these challenges and is used in several deployments for monitoring of bridges and buildings. Our system supports a diverse set of sensors, a library of highly optimized processing algorithms and a lightweight solution to support a wide range of network runtime configurations. This allows flexible partitioning of the application between the sensor network and the backend software. We present an analysis of this partitioning and evaluate the performance of our system in three experimental network deployments on civil structures.