Middleware Services for Structural Health Monitoring Using Smart Sensors

Smart sensors densely distributed over structures can use their computational and wireless communication capabilities to provide rich information for structural health monitoring (SHM). Though smart sensor technology has seen substantial advances during recent years, implementation of smart sensors on full-scale structures has been limited. While users often postulate that wired sensing systems can be simply replaced by wireless systems, off-the-shelf wireless systems are unlikely to provide the data users expect. Sensor component characteristics limit the quality of data collected; data from smart sensors may be inadequate due to packet loss during communication, time synchronization errors, and slow communication speeds. This paper addresses these issues common to smart sensor applications for structural health monitoring by developing corresponding middleware services, i.e., reliable communication, synchronized sensing, and model-based data aggregation. These middleware services are implemented on the Imote2 smart sensor platform, and their efficacy demonstrated experimentally.