Center for Embedded Network Sensing

An innovative networked embedded sensing system for structural health monitoring is currently being developed. This sensor network has been prototyped in the laboratory, and will be deployed in a series of forced-vibration tests involving a full-scale, four-story office building in the next coming months. The low-power wireless seismic sensor system enables the acquisition of 15–30 channels of 16-bit accelerometer data at 128 Hz over a wireless network. The advantage of such a system is its trivial deployability. This system contains several novel communication, data compression and time synchronization algorithms in order to deal with the low data rates and the lossy nature of low-power radios, as well as the inability to use GPS at each individual measurement. Our experiments indicate high-fidelity data acquisition, at the cost of slightly higher latency dictated by the radio data rates.