Autonomous Structural Condition Monitoring Based on Dynamic Code Migration and Cooperative Information Processing in Wireless Sensor Networks

摘要

Wireless sensor networks have emerged in recent years as a viable alternativesubstituting conventional, tethered systems for structural health monitoring.Because of the limited internal resources of wireless sensor nodes, new andinnovative concepts are needed to implement resource-efficient operation forreliable monitoring. This study explores the use of dynamic code migration andautomated, cooperative information processing as a means to achieve resourceefficiency and system reliability. Autonomous software agents are installed on thesensor nodes continuously executing simple resource-efficient routines to locallyprocess the data sets measured from the structure. Upon the detection of potentialanomalies in the data sets, specialized agents are physically migrating to therelevant sensor nodes to perform more complex – and resource-consuming –algorithms in order to analyze the local sensor data. Furthermore, a centralinformation pool, used by the software agents and continuously being updated, isintroduced to assess the system behavior. This paper presents a prototype systemwhich demonstrates the implementation of dynamic code migration and cooperativeinformation processing for autonomous condition monitoring.