Newmark Structural Engineering Laboratory. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Abstract
Wireless smart sensor networks have become an attractive alternative to traditional wired sensor
systems in order to reduce implementation costs of structural health monitoring systems. The
onboard sensing, computation, and communication capabilities of smart wireless sensors have
been successfully leveraged in numerous monitoring applications. However, the current data acquisition
schemes, which completely acquire data remotely prior to processing, limit the applications
of wireless smart sensors (e.g., for real-time visualization of the structural response). While
real-time data acquisition strategies have been explored, challenges of implementing highthroughput
real-time data acquisition over larger network sizes still remain due to operating system
limitations, tight timing requirements, sharing of transmission bandwidth and unreliable
wireless radio communication. This report presents the implementation of real-time wireless data
acquisition on the Imote2 platform. The challenges presented by hardware and software limitations
are addressed in the application design. The framework is then expanded for highthroughput
applications that necessitate larger networks sizes with higher sampling rates. Two
approaches are implemented and evaluated based on network size, associated sampling rate, and
data delivery reliability. Ultimately, the communication and processing protocol allows for nearreal-
time sensing of 108 channels across 27 nodes with minimal data loss.published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe