A migration-based approach towards resource-efficient wireless structural health monitoring

Wireless sensor networks have emerged as a complementary technology to conventional, cable-based systems for structural health monitoring. However, the wireless transmission of sensor data and the on-board execution of engineering analyses directly on the sensor nodes can consume a significant amount of the inherently restricted node resources. This paper presents an agent migration approach towards resource-efficient wireless sensor networks. Autonomous software agents, referred to as “on-board agents”, are embedded into the wireless sensor nodes employed for structural health monitoring performing simple resource-efficient routines to continuously analyze, aggregate, and communicate the sensor data to a central server. Once potential anomalies are detected in the observed structural system, the on-board agents autonomously request for specialized software programs (“migrating agents”) that physically migrate to the sensor nodes to analyze the suspected anomaly on demand. In addition to the localized data analyses, a central information pool available on the central server is accessible by the software agents (and by human users), facilitating a distributed-cooperative assessment of the global condition of the monitored structure. As a result of this study, a 95% reduction of memory utilization and a 96% reduction of power consumption of the wireless sensor nodes have been achieved as compared with traditional approaches.