This paper analyses the data collected from the 2 nd Jindo Bridge, a cable-stayed bridge in Korea that is a structural health monitoring (SHM) international test bed for advanced wireless smart sensors network (WSSN) technology. The SHM system consists of a total of 70 wireless smart sensor nodes deployed underneath of the deck, on the pylons, and on the cables to capture the vibration of the bridge excited by traffic and environmental loadings. Analysis of the data is performed in both the time and frequency domains. Modal properties of the bridge are identified using the frequency domain decomposition and the stochastic subspace identification methods based on the output-only measurements, and the results are compared with those obtained from a detailed finite element model. Tension forces for the 10 instrumented stay cables are also estimated from the ambient acceleration data and compared both with those from the initial design and with those obtained during two previous regular inspections. The results of the data analyses demonstrate that the WSSN-based SHM system performs effectively for this cable-stayed bridge, giving direct access to the physical status of the bridge.

Wireless smart sensor networks (WSSNs) have been proposed by a number of researchers to evaluate the current condition of civil infrastructure, offering improved understanding of dynamic response through dense instrumentation. As focus moves from laboratory testing to full-scale implementation, the need for multi-hop communication to address issues associated with the large size of civil infrastructure and their limited radio power has become apparent. Multi-hop communication protocols allow sensors to cooperate to reliably deliver data between nodes outside of direct communication range. However, application specific requirements, such as high sampling rates, vast amounts of data to be collected, precise internodal synchronization, and reliable communication, are quite challenging to achieve with generic multi-hop communication protocols. This paper proposes two complementary reliable multi-hop communication solutions for monitoring of civil infrastructure. In the first approach, termed herein General Purpose Multi-hop (GPMH), the wide variety of communication patterns involved in structural health monitoring, particularly in decentralized implementations, are acknowledged to develop a flexible and adaptable any-to-any communication protocol. In the second approach, termed herein Single-Sink Multi-hop (SSMH), an efficient many-to-one protocol utilizing all available RF channels is designed to minimize the time required to collect the large amounts of data generated by dense arrays of sensor nodes. Both protocols adopt the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol, which provides any-to-any routing and multi-cast capability, and supports a broad range of communication patterns. The proposed implementations refine the routing metric by considering the stability of links, exclude functionality unnecessary in mostly-static WSSNs, and integrate a reliable communication layer with the AODV protocol. These customizations have resulted in robust realizations of multi-hop reliable communication that meet the demands of structural health monitoring.

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