BriMon: Design and Implementation of Railway Bridge Monitoring Application

Abstract In this thesis we design a multi hop wireless sensor network based solution for the problem of structural bridge monitoring (of railway bridges). The problem presents several novel challenges. The real challenge here is to collect vibration data of a railway bridge, enabling on-demand analysis of the bridge. We not only provide an in-depth analysis of these challenges but also design a solution using multiple wireless technologies (IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4 ). We take an application driven approach in providing a solution to the above problem. The implemented solution shows how the design choices dictated solely by the application are different from the general solutions that exist in the sensor network domain. We design and implement protocols (routing and transport )o n motes which are