Autonomous Structural Condition Monitoring Based on Dynamic Code Migration and Cooperative Information Processing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have emerged in recent years as a viable alternative substituting conventional, tethered systems for structural health monitoring. Because of the limited internal resources of wireless sensor nodes, new and innovative concepts are needed to implement resource-efficient operation for reliable monitoring. This study explores the use of dynamic code migration and automated, cooperative information processing as a means to achieve resource efficiency and system reliability. Autonomous software agents are installed on the sensor nodes continuously executing simple resource-efficient routines to locally process the data sets measured from the structure. Upon the detection of potential anomalies in the data sets, specialized agents are physically migrating to the relevant sensor nodes to perform more complex and resource-consuming algorithms in order to analyze the local sensor data. Furthermore, a central information pool, used by the software agents and continuously being updated, is introduced to assess the system behavior. This paper presents a prototype system which demonstrates the implementation of dynamic code migration and cooperative information processing for autonomous condition monitoring.