Routing Protocols for Structural Health Monitoring of Bridges Using Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Monitoring older bridges using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has had a lot of  attention in recent years. In much of this research tasks like sensor data processing, environment states and events decision making are done by a remote server. A Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) application using WSNs to provide the data collection necessary for rapid structural assessment after an event such as a natural disaster has been simulated in this paper. Efficient MAC and routing protocols must be designed for the proposed application to offer a guarantee for the reliability of the data delivered from source nodes to a sink. The number of delivered reports, delay and the lifetime of the network are considered in the proposed application. As a result, a new cross layer based protocol was designed and simulated for this application using different scenarios and results are presented in this paper. Simulation results show that the cross layer based protocol can increase performance for the proposed application for a range of different scenarios