An Efficient Approach To Civil Structures Health Monitoring Using Fog Computing As Clusters Through 5G Network Environment

Abstract

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is a process to trace real time information about the physical health of a civil structures at any given point of time. SHM systems can also approximate the life expectancy of the structure. This constant monitoring can help during emergency situations such as earthquakes. The increasing need for SHM is the result of deterioration of several set of structures over time. A proper maintenance plan is beneficial to not just keep the structure in a favorable state throughout its lifecycle, but to additionally minimize the relative costs required by the structures through resource optimization. Various forms of SHM have been implemented over the past three decades like traditional wired systems. Recent development has resulted in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) being designed for the same purpose. Few publications have also included IoT framework along with WSNs. The introduction of WSN has led to easy deployment of SHM compared to the traditional wired network. But WSN's have led to significant challenges. The main challenge that has been focused in this paper is the constraint of power consumption. The power consumption is most critical factor for the sensors deployed in high-rise structures, high density traffic bridges etc., since it is difficult to reach the places to replace the battery drained sensors and also involved high installation cost. This paper proposes a concept of a framework for SHM with FOG computing which hasn't been explored in the field of SHM yet. In this model, the WSN is comprised of a piconet which transmits data through Bluetooth Low energy (LE) and the FOG transmits data to cloud by exploiting 5G network features in order to reduce the power consumption furthermore. Thus, saving power at every level possible in the SHM architecture. It also introduced a head sensor algorithm within clusters which maximizes the lifetime of the WSN. A mathematical model has been developed in support to evaluate how the power of the system can be minimized for the FOG node and cloud servers in accordance with the 5G network environment Experiments have been carried out to validate proposed framework and demonstrate the results.