Event-driven energy-harvesting wireless sensor network for structural health monitoring

Rare catastrophic events, like earthquakes, can cause substantial damage in a short span of time. Data on the level of stress sustained by buildings and other critical infrastructure acquired during the event can significantly help in post-disaster recovery and assessment of buildings´ structural integrity. While installing sensors to acquire such data is not difficult, ensuring that there is power to drive the sensors at the critical moment of the event is a challenge. In this paper, we propose an event-driven energy-harvesting (EDEH) wireless sensor network (WSN) in which the sensors are powered by the energy harvested from the consequence of the event, e.g. buildings shaking during an earthquake. The scarce amount of energy harvested during the short event occurrence time poses great challenges for the medium access control (MAC) design, which is the focus of our research. Furthermore, when all sensors harvest energy from the event, they become active simultaneously leading to serious channel contention problems. As such, we first examine the amount of harvestable energy and then show analytically that our MAC protocol is able to provide higher packet delivery ratio than conventional wireless technology, e.g. IEEE802.15.4.