Leed-lifetime Energy Efficient Data Acquisition Technique for Aircraft Structural Health Monitoring Systems

Implementation of low cost sensor nodes in recent years allows wireless sensor nodes to be applicable for wide range of applications in aircraft control systems. Rapid use of composite materials for aircraft structures, calls for the development of novel methods for aircraft structural health monitoring. Visual inspection of failures due to delamination of layers and cracks developed in metal structures does not prove to be a reliable method for failure detection. However the present scheduled aircraft structure maintenance methods involve a high maintenance cost. To overcome these shortcomings, wireless sensors can be embedded into these composite structures to detect the vibration energy and transmit the same to the central health monitoring unit. For aircraft structural health monitoring the major challenge lies is in the design and implementation of wireless sensor networks to extend the node lifetime by minimizing energy consumption with its limited resources. In this paper we propose a new data acquisition technique that is aimed to maximize both energy efficiency and the lifetime by making use of relay nodes and beacon enabled MAC. An energy efficient route is established between the source and the sink using the relay nodes. Beacon enabled MAC puts all the redundant nodes into sleep mode to save the energy further during data transfer. Through simulation we will show that our technique saves more energy, minimizes packet loss and delay and also increases the reliability of the network by increasing the active time of the relay nodes.