WiSeREmulator: An emulation framework for wireless structural health monitoring

Abstract

Many competing approaches exist in evaluating sensor network solutions differing by levels of ease of use, cost, control, and realism. Existing work concentrates on simulating network protocols or emulating processing units at the machine cycle level. However, little has been done to emulate the sensors and the physical environments that they monitor. The main contribution of this work is the design of WiserEmulator, an emulation framework for structural health monitoring, which gracefully balances the trade-offs between realism, controllability, and cost. WiserEmulator consists of two main components - a testbed of wireless sensor nodes and a software emulation environment. To emulate the excitation and response of piezo-electric transducers, as well as the wave propagation inside concrete structures, the COMSOL Multi-Physics software was utilized. Digitized sensing output from COMSOL was played back via a multi-channel Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) connected to the wireless sensor testbed. In addition to the emulation of concrete structures, WiSeREmulator also allows users to choose prestored data collected from field experiments and synthesized data. A user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) was developed that facilitates intuitive configurations of experimental settings, control of the on-set and progression of the experiments, and real-time visualization of experimental results. We have implemented WiSeREmulator in MATLAB. This work advances the state of the art in providing low cost solutions to evaluating Cyber Physical Systems such as wireless structural health monitoring networks.