High-Rate Sensing in Wireless Structure Monitoring Systems

In this paper, we present a feasibility study of high-rate sensing using off-shelf wireless sensor platforms for wireless structure monitoring. The objective is to determine the key system parameters and components that limit the performance of high-rate sensing applications and provide first-hand information on design tradeoffs faced in operational systems. For the measurement studies of data bandwidth, we have identified the bottleneck of the data path as the UART communication at the sink node. Implementations of high-layer abstractions in TinyOS are shown to be inefficient in turnaround time compared to native interfaces. Finally, the wireless-based solution is shown to have comparable fidelity as wire-based approaches for mid-range sampling rates.