Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Computer and Infonnation Technology (ICCIT 2011) 22-24 December, 2011, Dhaka, Bangladesh
A Reliable Structural Health Monitoring Protocol
Using Wireless Sensor Networks
Md. Abdul Hamid, M. Abdullah-AI-Wadud , Muhammad Mahbub Alam
Dept. of Information & Communications Engineering, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Yongin, Korea.
t
Dept. of Industrial and Management Engineering, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Yongin, Korea.
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Dept. of CIT, Islamic University of Technology, Board Bazar, Gazipur, Bangladesh.
hamid@hufs.ac.kr, wadud@hufs.ac.kr, mma@iut-dhaka.edu
Abstract
In this paper, we present a distributed reliable
structural health monitoring (SHM) protocol using
hierarchical wireless sensor networks. We assume that
the sensor network consists of (i) sensors capable of
sensing the structural health conditions (e. g. , strain,
vibration, pressure, temperature, etc. ), (ii) cluster-head
nodes that collect and process the sensory
measurements from the sensors and prepares a local
report and (iii) a sink that collects the local reports.
Sensors are organized into single hop clusters, each
managed by a cluster-head node. A cluster head should
take the sensor-faults into account when preparing the
local report based on the measurements of its
subordinate sensors. In majority decision�rule for
combining measurements, the judgement about health
status will follow the majority where a correct majority
decision requires that a majority of observing nodes
provide accurate measurements. Using Baysian
approach to form a judgment is problamatic without
additional information or assumptions (for example, the
difficulty of knowing conditional probabilities).
Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence based approach
overcomes these limitations. Unlike the simple binary
decision, it produces a judgment value between 0 and 1
that reflects the degree of belief in that judgment. It
discounts the unreliable observer's measurements. Our
results through extensive simulations show the efficacy
of the proposed scheme. We believe that our design
might lead to the development of commercial, cost­
effective, yet efficient and reliable distributed SHM
systems to effectively monitor and intelligently detect
structural health under various loads.
Keywords: Structural Health Monitoring, Wireless
Sensor Networks, Dempster-Shafer, Performance.
I. INTRODUCTION
A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of spatially
distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or
environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound,
vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants, and to
cooperatively pass their data through the network to a
main location. In particular, one of the important sensor
network applications is monitoring the structural health
[1], [2], [3], [4]. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM)
targets monitoring the in-situ behavior of a structure
such as a bridge, assessing its performance, detecting
987·161284·908·91111$26.00 © 201 I IEEE
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damage or deterioration, and determining the structure
condition or health. SHM is an active area of research
devoted to systems that can autonomously and
proactively assess the structural integrity of bridges,
buildings, and aerospace vehicles. Recent technological
advances promise the eventual ability to cover a large
civil structure with low-cost wireless sensors that can
continuously monitor a building'S structural health, but
researchers face several obstacles to reaching this goal,
including high data-rate, data-fidelity, and reliability
requirements. A combination of factors (e.g., recent
catastrophic natural disasters, terrorist activities, rapidly
deteriorating infrastructure, and increasing costs for new
construction, etc.) points to the need for a robust, low­
cost, low-power, and high-performance autonomous
wireless monitoring system for the "health " and safety
of buildings, bridges, and other civil structures. Existing
building monitoring systems are typically hard-wired,
sparse, expensive, and provide only limited data. The
use of wireless system would potentially be inexpensive
and extremely versatile, enabling the widespread use of
sensors with the capability of sensing various health
conditions such as strain, temperature, vibration
measurements.
The design of a robust structural health assessment
system would be applicable not only to bridges, dams
and major buildings but also industrial facilities such as
chemical plants, oil refineries, biotech and
pharmaceutical plants, high precision manufacturing
plants and other facilities requiring continuous, real­
time monitoring of large areas. However, there are two
fundamental challenges in such monitoring problem
using wireless sensor networks. First, the detection
accuracy is limited by the amount of noise associated
with the measurement and the reliability of sensor
nodes. The sensor nodes are usually low-end
inexpensive devices and sometimes exhibit unreliable
behavior. For example, a faulty sensor node may send a
physical measurement that reflects the severe condition
though, really it is not such in an event region and vice
versa. This might add an additional layer of complexity
for the damage assessment problem. Hence, it is
essential to consider these factors during health
monitoring to achieve better overall assessment
accuracy and to limit the effects of inaccurate
measurement or faulty behavior of individual
components to a minimum. Second, a WSN consists of
thousands of sensors that are in charge of both
monitoring and data transmission tasks. The data
collected by each sensor is transmitted via a network
consisting of other sensors towards a well identified
destination node called sink. In the basic setting of a
WSN, each individual piece of data is thus
independently transmitted over several hops towards the
sink and each sensor node is involved in the forwarding
of a large number of data pieces originated from other
sensors. In the resource constrained WSN environment,
forwarding of large amounts of data becomes the major
focus of energy and bandwidth optimization efforts. The
source of energy for a sensor node is most often an
attached battery cell. Hence, centralized health
monitoring algorithms, where all sensor nodes need to
transmit their individual measurements directly to a
central monitoring node (sink), are not suitable for a
wireless sensor network due to energy constraints.
Moreover, since high volume of data has to traverse a
large number of radio hops, network wiJI suffer from
high packet loss, buffer drops and increased delays and
will tend to be grossly unfair towards the nodes far
away from the sink. A localized, distributed and reliable
monitoring system is highly preferred for wireless
sensor networks.
Thus, in this paper, a distributed monitoring approach
has been put forward as an essential technique to
achieve fault-tolerant and reliable structural data
acquisition. The idea of distributed monitoring is to
have each of the independent sensors sends observation
to its corresponding cluster-head sensor that generates a
local decision from the small area surrounded by the
cluster-head node. Then the cluster-head sensor sends
the decision through other cluster-head sensors en-route
to the sink in order to reduce redundancy and minimize
bandwidth usage. Since, the structural-response data
acquisition is distributed (i.e., cluster-head sensors
continuously collect structural response data from their
local regions), each of the cluster-head nodes holds the
final report regarding the health condition. All the
reports (decisions) from aII the fusion sensors (cluster­
heads) have to be reached to the sink, because loss of a
particular packet will provide completely zero
knowledge about a region. Hence, such a distributed
monitoring requires almost 100% reliability. Moreover,
we explicitly introduce the sensor fault probability into
the reliable data collection process using the Dempster­
Shafer theory of evidence based approach, which helps
the cluster heads to make reliable reports based on the
sensor measurements.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
describes an overview of existing works. Section III
provides network model and assumptions. Section IV
presents the proposed fault-tolerant data coIIection
scheme in details. Section V presents performance
evaluation through simulations. FinaIIy, Section VI
concludes this paper.
II. RELATED WORKS
Structural health monitoring is a vast, interdisciplinary
area of research whose literature spans several decades
[1]. Wireless sensor networks promise cheap and dense
instrumentation for structural monitoring [2]. Recent
works have demonstrated the feasibility of continuous
structural data collection using a wireless network [5],
[3], [4]. However, existing approaches do not consider
the measurement uncertainty posed by the sensor nodes
and the problem of centralized data coIIection in which
sink coIIects aII the raw data, and so on.
There are several formalisms able to mathematicaIIy
model someone's degrees of belief. A very popular one
is the Bayesian Theory, which is based on a prior
knowledge of a probability distribution. Krishnamachari
and Iyengar introduced a fault-tolerant event detection
method [6] for wireless sensor networks using Bayesian
approach [7]. Based on the observation that the sensor
faults are likely to be stochastically uncorrelated, while
event measurements are likely to be spatially correlated,
they propose letting an individual sensor node
communicate with its n neighbors and using their binary
decisions to correct its own decision. A majority voting
scheme is shown to be the optimal decision scheme for
fault correction in their work. The scheme has the
advantage of being completely distributed and localized,
where each node only needs to obtain information from
its neighbor sensors in making its decisions. Authors in
[8] proposed a distributed fault-tolerant event detection,
which is an improvement of [6] considering two
additional important questions: (i) how to address both
the noise-related measurement error and sensor fault
simultaneously in fault-tolerant detection, and (ii) how
to choose a proper neighborhood size n for a sensor
node in fault correction such that the energy could be
conserved. Clearly, the Bayesian approach used in [6]
and [8] requires complete knowledge of both prior and
conditional probabilities, which might be difficult to
determine in practice. We often estimate prior
probabilities from empirical data, or, in the absence of
empirical data, we assume them to be uniform or some
other distribution. The outcome reflects these
assumptions, so the Bayesian approach's critics often
point out that the method is not weII equipped to handle
states of ignorance. Another model is the Theory of
Evidence or Dempster-Shafer theory [9], which
provides a method for combining evidences from
different sources without prior knowledge of their
distributions. In this latter method, it is possible to
assign probability values to sets of possibilities rather
than to single events only, and it is not needed to divide
all the probability values among the events, thus
modeling more naturally certain classes of problems.
We introduce Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence in
our health assessment technique in which no conditional
or prior probabilities need to be known. Knowing only
the individual sensor's reliability, Dempster's rules for
combination gives a numerical procedure for fusing
together multiple pieces of measurements from
unreliable sensors.
III. NETWORK MODEL AND ASSUMPTIONS
We consider a sensor network, where sensors are
organized into single hop clusters, each managed by a
cluster-head node. There are N cluster-head sensors
denoted as Ci where i 1,2,... , N, and a data collection
= fault using the concept of Dempster-Shafer theory of
center, called sink that form the infrastructure network. evidence in the measurement of structural health.
All the cluster-head sensors are connected to the sink in
A. Distributed Structural Health Assessment
a multi-hop fashion and the sink connects the network
to an external network (i.e., Internet). There are ni A. 1 Local Report Generation without Sensor Fault:
sensors denoted as Si,j' where j 1,2, ... , ni, associated
= Let us consider a distributed structural health
with C in one hop. For simplicity, we use Sj to denote assessment system where each cluster consists of n
sensing node Si,j throughout this paper. The network is a sensors as shown in Fig. 1. The measurements from n
tree like topology where non-leaf nodes are the cluster­ sensors are then combined at the cluster-head to make a
head nodes, and leaf nodes are the sensor nodes as final decision regarding the structural health condition.
depicted in Fig. 1. Each sensor node, Sj, (j 1,2,... , n) senses to measure
the structural health condition for Z different
=

We assume that a sensor node is in charge of

performing different types of application tasks (e.g., applications (e.g., vibration, pressure, strain,
sensing the strain, vibration, pressure temperature, etc. temperature, etc.). The sensed reading of Sj for the klh (k
in context of structural health assessment) and sending = 1,2,... , Z) application is denoted as R ; . Then, C can
its measurements to the cluster-head node. A cluster­
head node is responsible to collect sensory prepare the local report Rep 0 rt : for klh application
measurements from its leaf nodes to prepare a local using
report. Sensing nodes receive commands from and send
data to their cluster-head nodes, which pre-process the k k k k
Report, = (avg(Rj),max(Rj),min(Rj)), (1)
data as a report and forward them to other cluster-head
sensors in a multi-hop path (multi-hop whenever a
cluster-head cannot reach the sink in a single hop). Each where avg(R ; ), max(R ; ) andmin(R ; ) are the
report contains the overall health condition surrounding
average, maximum and minimum values, respectively,
the cluster-head node. Then, cluster-head nodes send
of the n sensor readings for the f(h application. Finally,
their local reports to the sink. Sensing nodes and
C can send this report to the sink.
cluster-head sensors are assumed to be stationary.
The approach presented above uses the raw data to be
sent to the sink by the fusion nodes (cluster-heads).
Indeed, fusion node prepares the report according to (1),
instead of preparing the final decision regarding the
health condition surrounded by the fusion node. Let us
consider one step further, in which individual cluster­
head node processes the raw data from the sensing
nodes and sends a local decision to the sink.
Suppose that each fusion node is given a predefined
reference threshold regarding the health condition of a
particular application. Let R :'1 denote the predefined
reference threshold of the klh application. The fusion
node Ci compares the individual readings, R ; , of the n

sensors against the R :'1 . The sensor reading reflects the

healthy condition if it follows the reference value, else it
reflects the unhealthy condition. Let a ; = 1 if sensor
S/s reading reflects healthy condition for the kth
application, and f3; = 1 otherwise. Based on that, C

computes the value H ,k ,which reflects whether the

space under observation of C maintains a certain level
of health condition for the kth application, according to
Fig. 1 A hierarchical sensor network model for structural health
monitoring (2).

IV. FAULT-TOLERANT DATA COLLECTION (2)

PROTOCOL

In this section, we first describe the distributed health

assessment with/without considering the sensor fault. Thus, C sends H ,k to the sink as a local decision. If H :
Then, we formally introduce the inclusion of sensor
is too low (i.e., majority of the sensing nodes' reading
reflect the worse condition around CD, the health
condition must be too bad around the cluster-head Ci.
Hence, if H / is less than a reference health value,
H :'1 ' monitoring center (sink) will consider this event
to be alarming. Besides, Ci may also send Report,k to
the sink as described earlier.
A.2 Local report generation with sensor fault: In the
absence of noise related measurement error and sensor
fault, the above strategy works well since the sensors
within a small region in the deployment area are likely
to have similar measurements, and the structural health
H ,'
condition provided by C is calculated from the
majority consensus. However, though this distributed
health assessment system can combine (at the fusion
sensor) data from multiple nodes to estimate the health
status, the observing sensor nodes might not be reliable
due to the sensor measurement error, noise and some
other reasons. Hence, this might be infeasible to
guarantee that the health status provided by H ,'
essentially genuine. So, when the fusion sensor
combines the offered measurements from sensor nodes
about a particular health status (e.g., vibration), reading
of every sensor mat not be fully reliable. Consequently,
a sensor may contribute contrary evidence
(measurement) to the [mal judgment at the fusion sensor
(For example, when health status is judged to be healthy
at the fusion sensor, a sensor node might have offered
its measurement reflecting the status to be unhealthy).
In majority decision-rule for combining measurements,
the judgment about health status follows the majority.
However, a correct majority decision requires that a
majority of observing nodes provide accurate
measurements. Moreover, all the sensors are given the
same importance in (2) regardless of their reliability.
Using Bayesian approach to form a judgment is
problematic without additional information or
assumptions (for example, the difficulty of knowing the
prior and conditional probabilities).
Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence based approach
overcomes these limitations. It produces a judgment
value between 0 and 1 that reflects the degree of belief
in that judgment. It discounts the unreliable observer's
measurements. In our distributed structural health
assessment approach, the Dempster-Shafer theory of
evidence is applied that considers measurement error of
sensor fault to accurately assess the structural health
status. We now first briefly explain the basics of the
Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence, and then present
our approach that applies this concept.
B. Basics of Dempster-Shafer Theory of
Evidence
Unlike the Bayesian Theory, the Theory of Evidence
[8] [9] does not need prior knowledge of the probability
distribution, and it is able to assign probability values to
sets of possibilities rather than to single events only.
Another differential is that there is no need to distribute
the whole probability among the events. The remaining
unavailable evidence is kept unassigned, not assigned to
the complement event as done in the classical
probability theories. These two differentials allow this
theory to model more precisely the natural reasoning
process on evidence accumulation, making it
progressively more popular.
As an example of how to apply Dempster-Shafer to
reasoning, suppose that a sensing node Sj is either
reliable with probability 0.9 or unreliable with
probability 0.1. Also suppose that node Sj provides the
measurement (to its corresponding cluster-head) which
states that the structural condition is healthy. If node Sj
itself is reliable, then its measurement is accurate, but if
Sj is not reliable, then its measurement is not necessarily
inaccurate. Node S/s measurement provides evidence
for 0.9 degrees of belief that structural condition is
healthy, but a zero degree of belief that structural
condition is not healthy (not 0.1). The zero does not
necessarily imply in impossibility, it means that node
is S/s measurement (evidence) provides no support to the
belief that structural condition is unhealthy. An interval
bounded by 0.9 and 0 might constitute a type of belief
function. In the presence of uncertainty, Dempster­
Shafer is concerned with bounds for probabilities of
provability rather than computing probabilities of truth.
This formalism provides methods for combining the
evidences provided by different sources (i.e., sensors),
being the Dempster's Rule the de-facto method.
A Frame of Discernment or Environment in Dempster­
Shafer is a set of primitive hypothesis. Let X denote the
frame of discernment. It must (i) be exhaustive, in the
sense of being complete, containing all possible
primitive (atomic) solution, and (ii) have mutually
exclusive primitive elements. Any hypothesis A will
refer to a subset of X for which observers can present
evidence. The set of all possible subsets of X, including
itself and the null set, is called a power set. There are
three types of values that can be assigned to hypotheses:
(i) the basic probability assignment, or mass function,
(ii) belief function, and (iii) plausibility function, as
described in the following.
The basic probability assignment, or mass function,
assigns some quantity of belief (evidence) to the
elements of the power set. The mass function, m,
assigns a number in the interval [0, 1] to each subset of
X, where 0 means no belief, and I means certainty. The
sum of all assignments is equal to I, meaning that the
right hypothesis is in the frame of discernment. The
probability not assigned to any element, named "non­
assigned belief' is assigned to X The mass function
follows the following two conditions:
1
m(¢)= ° I
�
I
m(A):?:O, VA (3)
X
I.
I m(A)=1 I
Ac;;;;X J
Thus, meA) is the measure of the belief assigned by a
given evidence to A, where A is any element of the
power set. As meA) deals with the belief assigned to A
only, and not to subsets, none belief is forced by the
lack of knowledge.
The belief function, Bel, measures how much the
information given by a source support the belief for a
specified element as the right answer. Thus, belief
function maps each hypothesis A to a value as
1
I unhealthy. So, the power set of X has four elements:
Be/(¢)= 0,
L m(B) ·
Be/(A)=
J
. B
'e
The Bel(A) represents the weight of evidence supporting
A's provability, On the other hand, the upper probability
function, or plausibility function, PI, measures how
much the information given by source does not
contradict a specified element as the right answer. In
other words, the plausibility is the weight of
evidence that do not refute B. The plausibility function
to the element A is:
1
I
PI(¢)=O,
PI(A)= . L m(B) ·
�nH*¢ J 1
There are several ways of taking the final decision. For
instance, decision can be made by choosing the
hypothesis with the maximum mass, belief or
plausibility.
B. 1 Rules of combination of evidences
different observers: Evidences obtained from two
independent sources and expressed by the two mass
functions ml and mz on the same power set can be
properly combined to obtain a joint mass function ml,z,
The Dempster's rule of combination is expressed by
orthogonal sum and normalization as given by
m(¢)=O,
L m,(B)m,(C)
�n
B �c_��A ________
m(A)=
1- K
where K represents the degree of conflict given by
K 2: m,(B)m,(C).
=
BnC=¢
According to Dempster's rule of combination, the
evidences ml(B) and mz(C) the two sources are
combined by considering the product ml(B)mzCc),
which focuses on the intersection Bn c. Obviously, as
there could be more than one pair of sets that have the
same intersection, a sum of products is present in (6).
Moreover, some intersections may be empty. Therefore,
in order to satisty the conditions in (3) for the basic
probability assignments, the products ml(B)mz(C) where
Bn c ¢ must not be included in ml,Z, and the mass
= node might not be judged properly.
values should be normalized using I-K.
C. Application of Dempster-Shafer Theory of
Evidence in Fault-tolerant Data Collection in
SHM
In the context of SHM, there are two possibilities
concerning the health condition of a civil structure:
healthy or unhealthy. Therefore, according to the
Dempster-Shafer theory, the frame of discernment
consists of two possibilities regarding the value
calculated by the fusion node: X = {H ,H} , where H
means structural condition is healthy and H means
(4)
X
- -
null set, hI = {H}, hz = {H} , and h3 = = {H ,H} .
Suppose that the basic belief (reliability) of sensor Sj is
PI. If node Sj provides the measurement that is healthy,
then its mass value assignment (according Dempster­
Shafer) will be the following: m;Chl) Pj' m;Chz) 0, and
= =
m;Ch3) I - Pj' If node Sk provides the measurement that
=
is unhealthy, its basic probability assignment will be the
following: mihl) =0, mk(hz) P k, and mk(h3) I - Pk. In
= =
this way, a cluster-head can have the mass values based
on the decisions of its n subordinate sensors. Then,
according to Dempster's rule of combination in (6), the
combined mass values can be calculated using
(5)
I
m(¢)=O,
"
L TI m (S )
, , i, (8)
.
meA)= v,,,,,,��,�
J
where K represents the degree of conflict given by
from
(9)
Thus the combined mass values, from the evidences
provided by the n sensors, can be calculated for hI and
hz. The fusion sensor finally prepares the report based
on the higher value between m(hl) and m (hz).
(6) C. 1 Computing the Basic Belief p: A significant
difficulty lays in the problem of determining the
reliability a node. Due to lack of proved probability
distribution model or due to unavailability of accurate
mathematical analysis, in many syatems using
Dempster-Shafer theory, the probability numbers are in
fact simply assigned by expert opinion [10]. But the
(7)
problem with this is that over time, the sensor device's
capability of sensing may deteriorate or change. So,
dynamism is not considered in this approach.
Another approach might be to use historical data to get
the ratio of correctness. However, if entire history is
considered, this impact will be very less. For example,
if a sensor node provides 1000 correct readings, after
that suddenly it begins to provide wrong readings. So,
the ratio or percentage of the correct readings will still
be high, and it will take long time to consider its
reliability to be low. Therefore, realiability of a sensor
We propose to use a reliability calculation mechanism much less when the proposed method is used. It shows
by each cluster-head node based on the recent history the stability of the proposed scheme.
(i.e., immediate past) of each sensor nodes. Let pk-l
J

p
VI. CONCLUSIONS
and �"" be the immediate past and current,
In this paper, we have presented a protocol for structural
respectively, reliabilities of sensor Sj at the kth decision health monitoring using wireless sensor networks. Here
interval. The updated reliability p � of Sj' to be used every cluster-head uses the Dempster-Shafer theory of
during the (k+ l)th decision interval, is calculated using evidence to take the final decision while aggregating
different measurements for the subordinate nodes in that
cluster. Results through simulations show that the
(10) proposed method achieves higher reliabilities than the
existing event detection mechanisms.
where t5 is the tuning parameter that controls the rate of
update, and p �u" is calculated by REFERENCES

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:::: _

W
1 '
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V. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
In this section, we evaluate the performance of the
proposed fault-tolerant data collection protocol through
simulations using C++. We examine the effectiveness of
the proposed protocol in terms of the percentage of
detection errors in the reports generated by the cluster­
heads.
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