Real-time wireless sensor networks for civil structure safety monitoring

Wireless networks of sensors greatly extend ability to monitor and control the physical world. Networked sensors can collaborate and aggregate the huge amount of sensed-data to provide continuous and spatially dense observation of civil structures. Applications include structure envirornmental monitoring of walls, bridges, dam, and so on. Instrumenting the physical world, particularly for such applications, requires that the sensor nodes we use are small, lightweight, unobtrusive, and untethered. In this paper a classification for wireless sensor network was given first, then architectures of wireless networked sensors were described, especially two sorts of architectures of Bluetooth-enabled wireless networked sensors were presented, where Bluetooth and embedded system featured largely. Thereafter, the real-time wireless networked sensor and embedded system (WNSES) for structure safety monitoring were discussed, including new ideas of sensing interface, computational core and wireless communication; our interests of research mainly lie in stability and reliability of wireless communications, and scheme of wireless networking including real time connectivity to Internet. To fulfill physical sensing of environmental phenomena and reporting of measurements through wireless network communication, a wireless networked sensor is to be designed with an embedded system; an appropriate type of 32bits embedded processor was selected, real time operation system called. as uClinux was decided on, and corresponding system software design was done as well which provided low-level drivers, a scheduler and Bluetooth high-level protocols. Finally, an application example named as wireless remote surveillance system was illustrated.