A “Smart Dust”-Based Road Condition Monitoring System: Performance of A Small Wireless Sensor Network using Surge Time Synchronization

Pavement maintenance is vital for travel safety and thus detecting dangerous road conditions in real-time fashion is desirable. Using off-the-shelf sensors and a wireless sensor network product to detect such conditions at a low cost poses many challenges. To meet these challenges, a “Smart Dust” (i.e., the Mica2 Motes)-based sensor network is adopted in a proof-of-concept study to monitor pavement temperature and moisture presence in order to detect hazardous road conditions [9]. There are many hardware and software development issues associated with such a monitoring system including the selection of sensors, programming Motes, and packaging sensors and the Motes. This paper presents the continuous development of this road condition monitoring system focusing on the use of Surge Time Synchronization for the proposed smart wireless sensing application. A “Smart Dust” wireless sensor network with a total of five nodes is deployed in an outdoor environment with uniform Mote intervals including 25, 50 and 100 feet, and operated for more than 12 hours in each test. Troubleshooting experiences are introduced and test results are analyzed to reveal the performance concerning connectivity, packet reception rate, initial connection time, error rate and power consumption.