Spatio-temporal protocol for power-efficient acquisition wireless sensors based SHM

In this work, we address the so-called sensor reachback problem for Wireless Sensor Networks, which consists in collecting the measurements acquired by a large number of sensor nodes into a sink node which has major computational and power capabilities. Focused on applications such as Structural Health Monitoring, we propose a cooperative communication protocol that exploits the spatio-temporal correlations of the sensor measurements in order to save energy when transmitting the information to the sink node in a non-stationary environment. In addition to cooperative communications, the protocol is based on two well-studied adaptive filtering techniques, Least Mean Squares and Recursive Least Squares, which trade off computational complexity and reduction in the number of transmissions to the sink node. Finally, experiments with real acceleration measurements, obtained from the Canton Tower in China, are included to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.