A high computational power wireless sensor network for distributed structural health monitoring

This paper presents the design of a wireless sensor network consisting of high computational power sensor nodes to support distributed structural health monitoring. The unique features of the presented sensor nodes are their high computational capability, multi-modality sensing, and combined ability for both active and passive sensing. These embedded computer-based sensor nodes include Linux operating system; integrate with C numerical libraries; embed a mobile agent-based network middleware; and provide web services at sensor node level. The software development of wireless sensor nodes utilises a two-layer approach. The open software architecture design of the upper layer promotes software reuse and speeds up the development cycle by employing available numerical algorithms in open software packages such as CLAPACK and Numerical Recipes in C. Several experimental tests are presented including accelerometer test using a scaled steel bridge, strain gauge measurement on a deflectometer, and relative humidity and temperature tests.