A multi-radio sink node designed for wireless SHM applications

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is an application area of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) which usually needs high data communication rate to transfer a large amount of monitoring data. Traditional sink node can only process data from one communication channel at the same time because of the single radio chip structure. The sink node constitutes a bottleneck for constructing a high data rate SHM application giving rise to a long data transfer time. Multi-channel communication has been proved to be an efficient method to improve the data throughput by enabling parallel transmissions among different frequency channels. This paper proposes an 8-radio integrated sink node design method based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and the time synchronization mechanism for the multi-channel network based on the proposed sink node. Three experiments have been performed to evaluate the data transfer ability of the developed multi-radio sink node and the performance of the time synchronization mechanism. A high data throughput of 1020Kbps of the developed sink node has been proved by experiments using IEEE.805.15.4.