Efficient multihop communication for static wireless sensor networks in the application to civil infrastructure monitoring

Multihop communication is an essential functionality of wireless smart sensor networks used for full-scale civil infrastructure monitoring. It allows sensors to cooperate and deliver data between nodes outside the direct communication range. Multihop communication that can reliably collect a large amount of data generated by the entire monitoring system to a single base-station can be made efficient with the consideration of the specific communication characteristics of civil infrastructure monitoring as well as radio interference and channel contention. This paper proposes an efficient multihop communication service for large static wireless sensor networks in the application to civil infrastructure monitoring. The proposed protocols include a flooding-based routing method that is able to efficiently generate stable static routes and a theoretically efficiency-optimal data collection protocol to promptly retrieve data from the entire network. Additionally, crucial enhancements are introduced for the stable implementation of the proposed methods. Experiments and a full-scale instrumentation are also included to demonstrate the protocols' applicability. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.