Middleware services for structural health monitoring using smart sensors

T. Nagayama, B. F. Spencer, K. A. Mechitov, G. A. Agha

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

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. Hardware resources available on smart sensors restrict data acquisition capabilities; intrinsic to these wireless systems are packet loss, data synchronization errors, and relatively slow communication speeds. This paper addresses these issues under the hardware limitation by developing corresponding middleware services. The reliable communication service requires only a few acknowledgement packets to compensate for packet loss. The synchronized sensing service employs a resampling approach leaving the need for strict control of sensing timing. The data aggregation service makes use of application specific knowledge and distributed computing to suppress data transfer requirements. These middleware services are implemented on the Imote2 smart sensor platform, and their efficacy demonstrated experimentally.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)119-137
Number of pages19
JournalSmart Structures and Systems
Volume5
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2009

Keywords

  • Middleware services
  • Reliable communication
  • Smart sensor
  • Structural health monitoring
  • Synchronized sensing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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