A new low-power wireless sensor network for real-time bridge health diagnosis system

With the development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), it is applied in various fields, such as bridge health diagnosis. In previous bridge health diagnosis system, most of researches use general network models which cannot real-time acquire data or have high power consumption. In order to adapt the network characters, this paper presents a new type Low-power WSN, named LW, for real-time bridge health diagnosis system. Comparing with the WSN of previous bridge diagnosis systems, the contributions of this paper are two aspects. First, a low-power node module board to reduce the power consumption of hardware is designed. Next, an energy efficient and real-time data collection algorithm based on time table (TDMA) is designed to make WSN able to collect data efficiently. This paper also presents several simulations and experiments to show that our design choices are indeed quite effective.