A network topology design for structural health monitoring

A network topology design for structural health monitoring is proposed. It is achieved by the development of wireless sensor network with the interfacing from the civil structure sensors. A plug-and-play scheme is designed for the platform sensor node, which is consisted of two major circuit boards. One is based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard of low power consumption wireless module for the signal transmitting and/or receiving, and the other is for acquiring sensing data. In addition to the hardware design for the sensor node, the firmware for both of the MAC and PHY layers in network coding was modified from TI standard design to provide applicable function calls for facilitating the design. Based on our own developed adaptive wireless sensor platform, a source routing scheme is proposed with the help of the designed flexible beacon synchronization method. Moreover, a network topology is also designed to fit the larger scale of structural health monitoring. Experimental results demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed network topology scheme for structural health monitoring.