A migration-based approach towards resource-efficient wireless structural health monitoring

Wireless sensor networks have emerged as a complementary technology to conventional, cable-based systems for structural health monitoring. However, the wireless transmission of sensor data and the on-board execution of engineering analyses directly on the sensor nodes can consume a significant amount of the inherently restricted node resources. This paper presents an agent migration approach towards resource-efficient wireless sensor networks. To efficiently use the limited computational resources, autonomous software agents, referred to as “on-board agents”, are embedded into the wireless sensor nodes employed for structural health monitoring. The autonomous on-board agents perform simple resourceefficient routines, continuously analyze and aggregate the sensor data recorded from the monitored structural system, and transmit the aggregated data sets in periodic intervals to a central server. Once potential anomalies are detected in the observed structural system, the on-board agents autonomously request for specialized software programs (“migrating