A power-aware wireless sensor network based bridge monitoring system

Recent proliferation of sensor networks in diverse applications has made the low-power wireless sensor network an important design issue. Structural health monitoring is one of the important applications of the wireless sensor network. A robust wireless structural monitoring strategy requires appropriate choice of the wireless network topology as well as some suitable protocols. This paper presents a power-aware sensor network, which can be used for the monitoring of bridges. Event-driven data communication protocols have been used to minimize energy drawn from the battery. All the sensor nodes remain in low-power sleep mode unless triggered either by a base station or by another sensor node in the neighborhood. Two ways of collecting data have been proposed and their performances in terms of the number of motes versus network lifetime have been compared.