Sensor Network Issues in the Sustainable Bridges Project

The proliferation of sensor network research in the past years has lead to an increase on the number of applications developed for the most diverse areas. Some projects like Hogthrob or Floodnet deal with the monitoring of animals, habitats or environmental conditions in a cost-effective way. Others, like Ubicare are health monitoring applications, whereas Odyssey or WINS allows the U.S. military to perform underwater surveillance and terrain exploration. Finally, applications such as intelligent traffic systems and smart room environments provide the necessary infrastructure to allow users to interact with their environment (cars or buildings) in a more sophisticated and efficient way. In the case of vehicular networks, for example, the user is assisted in the process of driving by allowing important information like traffic jam or road conditions data to be distributed to other cars immediately. In this paper, however, we concentrate on Sustainable Bridges, an Intelligent Building Monitoring application, being developed as part of the 6 Framework Programme from the European Union [1]. Sustainable Bridges is a project with 32 partners from all over Europe which assesses the readiness of railway bridges to meet the demands of the 2020 scenario and provides the means for upgrading them in case they fall short. The 2020 scenario requires increased capacities with heavier loads to be carried and bigger forces to be absorbed due to longer faster trains and mixed traffic. An important part of this project is to provide efficient monitoring of bridges using MEMS and wireless technology. As we will see in the following sections, the Sustainable Bridges application exhibits some interesting characteristics that make it the ideal place to investigate and test canonical problems related to the field of sensor network research. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section II gives a brief overview of the Sustainable Bridges project and identifies the characteristics related its sensor network architecture and application domain. Section III identifies the research issues related to the project, provides some insights about related work and gives a list of some of the challenges that need to be solved within the project. Finally, section IV concludes this paper.