A low-power design of a bridge scour monitoring system

This paper proposes a data processing flow that reduces the power consumption of a bridge scour monitoring system (BSMS) that was designed to estimate the current bridge scour status in real time. The BSMS contains 20 sets of sensing nodes, which are placed at each bridge pier to monitor the bridge scour status. An IP camera placed on the bridge monitors the bridge structure and the water level. These data are first transferred to the monitor and control system (MCS) to store the data and the data are then sent to the wireless access point (AP). To simplify the system structure, the peer to peer (P2P) network topology was used to transfer the data to the base station (BS) on the shore. The BS strengthens the data signal and then transfers to the Internet as the database of the cloud-computing system. In practical application, the sensing data are especially useful in a flood when the power might fail. Extending the life-time of the backup battery power of the BSMS, requires a low-power data processing topology. A data processing topology that reduces the total power consumption by approximately 11.6% of that of the traditional data processing topology was designed. Moreover, because the data size between the image data and the sensing data from the sensors varies substantially, the data from the sensor nodes was combined with image data to increase the efficiency of the wireless transfer rate.