Agility of wireless sensor networks for earthquake monitoring of bridges

Applying wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for bridge monitoring has received considerable interests over the past few years. In this paper two WSN-agility problems are identified based on the deployment experiences of WSNs in earthquake monitoring of bridges: (i) timely capturing the earthquake response of bridges and (ii) quasi-realtime processing of the measured data for bridge modal identification in monitoring the features of the structure. This paper also presents solutions for these problems: a pulse-based media access control scheme for the first problem and a distributed approach to modal identification by spectral methods for the second problem to address the combined agility issues. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.