Self organizing wireless sensor networks for structural health monitoring

A smart sensor node has been developed which has (a) the ability, to sense strain of the structure under observation (b) process this raw sensor data in cooperation with its neighbors and (c) transmit the information to the end user. These sensor nodes are interconnected by a loosely coupled network called sensor network. The network is designed to be self organizing in the sense of establishing and maintaining the inter node connectivity without the need for human intervention. For the envisioned application of structural health monitoring, wireless communication is the most practical solution not only because they,, eliminate interconnecting wires but also for their ability to establish communication links even in inaccessible regions. But wireless network brings with it a number of issues such as interference, fault tolerant self organizing, multi-hop communication, energy efficiency, routing and finally reliable operation in spite of massive complexity of the system. This paper addresses the issue of fault tolerant self organizing in wireless sensor networks. We propose a new architecture called the Redundant Tree Network (RTN). RTN is a hierarchical network which exploits redundant links between nodes to provide reliability.