Comparative Study of IoT-Based Topology Maintenance Protocol in a Wireless Sensor Network for Structural Health Monitoring

Abstract

A structural health monitoring (SHM) system is an approach for identifying the damages caused to various kinds of structures using different system functions and providing the necessary feedback about structure’s conditions. As civil structures are the backbone of our society, to determine its daily operations is a very important issue. The performance measurement of those structures is manual whereas a computer-based monitoring system could automatically assess the structural damages and identify its exact location. Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted a great deal of attention for remote sensing applications due to flexibility to measure of various activity of large scale network. Since technology is advancing day by day, the overall cost of a monitoring system is also decreased. However, the major challenging fact of a WSNs is to provide scalability for covering a large area. The main question is arisen how much capable have of a monitoring system to turn off unnecessary nodes to save energy while there are no events detected. To support the scalability required of an existing network and save the node energy for future use, we propose a topology maintenance protocol integrated with construction to address the issue of a node’s energy consumption by placing it optimally and extending the monitoring system’s lifetime. As per the authors’ acknowledgement that, a little attention has been paid to developing such a hybrid approach. To mitigate node energy consumption issue with large scale support, an Internet of Things (IoT)-based maintenance approach is the best candidate for obtaining better system lifetime responses. Therefore, the main goal of this work is to develop an ‘on-the-fly’-based topology maintenance monitoring system, which can maintain a network’s infrastructure while gathering a node’s information to switch its state regularly when the present network is no longer optimal.