CEEDS: A Cost Effective Event Detection System for Energy Efficient Railway Bridge Monitoring with Wireless Sensor Network

Railway Bridge Health Monitoring (RHM) is of prime importance as damages in bridges can lead to huge casualties. Wireless sensor network (WSN) has come up as a promising technology for health monitoring. WSN has severe energy and hardware constraints. In this paper, we propose an event detection system for WSN deployed for RHM. Our proposed system takes different constraints of sensor networks into consideration and efficiently uses the limited resources of sensors. The system keeps the sensors awake only during the time a train passes over the bridge and in sleep mode otherwise. The real time exponential moving average of the vibration signal of a sensor placed on the railway track is computed by our algorithm and the arrival of the train is detected if consecutive series of samples lie within two threshold bounds. Theoretical and experimental results indicate that our proposed system can considerably increase the service lifetime of sensor networks and aid in automating the RHM.