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LoRaWAN Battery-Free Wireless Sensors Network Designed for Structural Health Monitoring in the Construction Domain.

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Takacs, Alexandru 
Udrea, Florin 

Abstract

This paper addresses the practical implementation of a wireless sensors network designed to actualize cyber-physical systems that are dedicated to structural health monitoring applications in the construction domain. This network consists of a mesh grid composed of LoRaWAN battery-free wireless sensing nodes that collect physical data and communicating nodes that interface the sensing nodes with the digital world through the Internet. Two prototypes of sensing nodes were manufactured and are powered wirelessly by using a far-field wireless power transmission technique and only one dedicated RF energy source operating in the ISM 868 MHz frequency band. These sensing nodes can simultaneously perform temperature and relative humidity measurements and can transmit the measured data wirelessly over long-range distances by using the LoRa technology and the LoRaWAN protocol. Experimental results for a simplified network confirm that the periodicity of the measurements and data transmission of the sensing nodes can be controlled by the dedicated RF source (embedded in or just controlled by the associated communicating node), by tuning the radiated power density of the RF waves, and without any modification of the software or the hardware implemented in the sensing nodes.

Description

Keywords

Internet of Things (IoT), communicating material, cyber-physical systems (CPS), simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), structural health monitoring (SHM), wireless power transmission (WPT), wireless sensor network (WSN), Electric Power Supplies, Environment Design, Humans, Humidity, Monitoring, Physiologic, Superconductivity, Temperature, Transducers, Wireless Technology

Journal Title

Sensors (Basel)

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1424-8220
1424-8220

Volume Title

19

Publisher

MDPI AG