Synchronization of IoT Layers for Structural Health Monitoring

Abstract

We spend a lot of time within buildings. The research field of the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is aimed to diagnose the state of structures, to prevent that our houses, bridges, offices or other civil infrastructures could become deadly traps as a result of not visible damages. In this paper a SHM system is proposed, that exploits the Internet-of-Things paradigm, to perform in real-time not only the monitoring or damage detection, but also to send a remote notification, finalized to alert the authorities and rescuers, about the potential collapse of a buildings. In this context the timing notification depends both on the ability of the system to detect the invisible damages, using the information collected by several sensors correlated in time, and the delay in the transmission of such information from the building up to the authorities and rescuers offices. Experimental tests highlight the effectiveness of the proposed method to resolve the synchronization problem among sensor signals and to estimate the impact of the data transmission delay on the application logic.