Long-Range Low-Power Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Network for Monitoring the Vibration Response of Long-Span Bridges

Recently, vibration-based monitoring technologies have become extremely popular, providing effective tools to assess the health condition and evaluate the structural integrity of civil structures and infrastructures in real-time. In this context, battery-operated wireless sensors allow us to stop using wired sensor networks, providing easy installation processes and low maintenance costs. Nevertheless, wireless transmission of high-rate data such as structural vibration consumes considerable power. Consequently, these wireless networks demand frequent battery replacement, which is problematic for large structures with poor accessibility, such as long-span bridges. This work proposes a low-power multi-hop wireless sensor network suitable for monitoring large-sized civil infrastructures to handle this problem. The proposed network employs low-power wireless devices that act in the sub-GHz band, permitting long-distance data transmission and communication surpassing 1 km. Data collection over vast areas is accomplished via multi-hop communication, in which the sensor data are acquired and re-transmitted by neighboring sensors. The communication and transmission times are synchronized, and time-division communication is executed, which depends on the wireless devices to sleep when the connection is not necessary to consume less power. An experimental field test is performed to evaluate the reliability and accuracy of the designed wireless sensor network to collect and capture the acceleration response of the long-span Manhattan Bridge. Thanks to the high-quality monitoring data collected with the developed low-power wireless sensor network, the natural frequencies and mode shapes were robustly recognized. The monitoring tests also showed the benefits of the presented wireless sensor system concerning the installation and measuring operations.