A high-throughput multi-hop WSN for structural health monitoring

Abstract

Two major challenges with existing multi-hop WSNs used for structural health monitoring (SHM) are how to increase the data transmission rate (DTR) for large amounts of sampling data and enlarge the data transmission range without degrading link quality. To handle these issues, this paper proposes a new design method of a multi-hop WSN with multi-radio sink node (M-RSN) and double-radio relay node (D-RRN) which can increase the data transfer ability at the sink and extend the monitoring distance without degrading wireless link quality. Additionally, a tight scheduled approach and multi-radio time synchronization method are designed for the stable implementation of the proposed network. To evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed network designing method, experiments in outdoor environment and for aircraft composite wing boxes monitoring are carried out. The evaluation results have shown the advantages of the proposed methods.