Challenges In The Use of Wireless Sensor Networks for Monitoring The Health of Civil Structures

This chapter provides an overview of the challenges faced in the design of new techniques for enabling new decentralized solutions of large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in the structural health monitoring (SHM) domain. It introduces the definition of SHM along with the concept of WSNs. The chapter discusses the concepts of SHM and WSNs apart from one another. The chapter explains existent solutions employing WSNs in the context of SHM. It focuses on SHM techniques based on the use of accelerometers; but in further investigations, this classification can be expanded to works that use other kinds of sensing devices, for example, strain gauges, following the same logic of higher degrees of decentralization and in-network processing. The concept of ?>generations of sensor networks for SHM?> was used for such classification. Each generation is presented by describing respective examples of works found in the current literature.