Wireless Sensor Network Tesbed for Structural Health Monitoring of Bridges

The Road and Traffic Authority (RTA) of NSW, Australia, partnered with NICTA, are looking into wireless sensor network technologies to monitor the structural health of bridges. The task involves exploring different sensing, networking, and distributed computation approaches for the specific application of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). The exploration has to happen on-site with real world conditions. We argue that the on-site exploration needs an over-provisioned testbed that will provide the sensing nodes with power and an alternate wired communication channel. Even though the implementation and deployment of such a testbed is more expensive than deploying a single standalone Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), we show that a single standalone WSN cannot operate throughout the life cycle of experimentation.