Embedded Damage Detection in Water Pipelines Using Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes a distributed real-time detection algorithm for detecting rupture events in water pipelines noninvasively. The purpose is to suppress not only unnecessary transmission but also local processing in order to save power without sacrificing sensitivity or specificity of the events of interest. All these goals are accomplished by adaptive thresholding, a cascaded wake-up chain, local processing, and aggressive power management. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves high sensitivity and high specificity while reducing the total energy consumption significantly.