Design of Multichannel and Multihop Low-Power Wide-Area Network for Aircraft Vibration Monitoring

Vibration-based condition monitoring among all the components of the aircraft structure is an important approach to improve the flight safety before any component in aircraft reaches resonance. This paper presents multichannel and multihop low-power wide-area network (MCMHL) architecture suitable for vibration monitoring on aircraft. First, microelectro mechanical system-long Range (LoRa)-based sensor node architecture in light of hardware cross-layer algorithm is proposed for implementing the tradeoff among hardware cost, power consumption, and performance. To achieve high accuracy of synchronous acquisition, multihop slot segmenting scheduling and multichannel data communication algorithm are proposed. In addition, the beacon transmission delay, of beacon between sink and sensor nodes is calculated, and further synchronization compensation algorithm is designed. The experiments of the proposed approach in aircraft vibration test and data synchronization test on aircraft skin are validated, showing that the proposed MCMHL approach has these abilities of data synchronous collections, remote communication, and data stream uploading in a wide monitoring area.