Elevator-Assisted Sensor Data Collection for Structural Health Monitoring

—Sensor networks nowadays are widely used for structural health monitoring; for example, the sensor monitoring system deployed on the Guangzhou New TV Tower, China. While wired systems still dominate, it is commonly believed that wireless sensors will play a key role in the near future. One key difficulty for such systems is the data transmission from the sensor nodes to the base station. Given the long span of the civil structures, neither a strategy of long-range one-hop data transmission nor short-range hop-by-hop communication is cost-efficient. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme of using the elevators to assist data collection. A base station is attached to an elevator. A representative node on each floor collects and transmits the data to the base station using short range communication when the elevator stops at or passes by this floor. As such, communication distance can be minimized. To validate the feasibility of the idea, we first conduct an experiment in an ele...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: TMC
• Authors: Tao Zhang, Dan Wang, Jiannong Cao, Yi Qing Ni, Lijun Chen 0006, Daoxu Chen
• Keywords: Logical Reasoning, Optimization Problem, Structural Health, TMC 2012, Wireless Sensors