Networked Computing in Wireless Sensor Networks for Structural Health Monitoring

Abstract—This paper studies the problem of distributed computation over a network of wireless sensors. While this problem applies to many emerging applications, to keep our discussion concrete we will focus on sensor networks used for structural health monitoring. Within this context, the heaviest computation is to determine the singular value decomposition (SVD) to extract mode shapes (eigenvectors) of a structure. Compared to collecting raw vibration data and performing SVD at a central location, computing SVD within the network can result in significantly lower energy consumption and delay. Using recent results on decomposing SVD, a well-known centralized operation, we seek to determine a near-optimal communication structure that enables the distribution of this computation and the reassembly of the final results, with the objective of minimizing energy consumption subject to a computational delay constraint. We show that this reduces to a generalized clustering problem, and est...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Apoorva Jindal, Mingyan Liu
• Keywords: Approximate Algorithm, CORR 2010, Delay Constraint, Education, Energy Consumption