Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are ideal for covering or monitoring an operating environment. 1 Generally, sensor nodes sense the environment, help forward data from other nodes, and transmit them wirelessly to several sinks. WSNs are very suitable for structural health monitoring (SHM), especially for some critical infrastructure and protective buildings. Because of the simplicity of installation and low maintenance cost, SHM using WSNs has been given increasing attention and rapid development.2–7
Numerous challenges for conventional battery-powered WSNs arise when used in SHM. Some typical problems include the large amount of collected data, frequent battery replacement, highly precise requirements for synchronization among nodes, and highly reliable control protocols, especially for large-scale networks. These issues can be significantly resolved by equipping nodes with energy harvesting (EH) functions: EH function blocks could harvest energy from the ambient environment (e.g. solar and wind) and use this energy to drive the workload of sensor nodes. Moreover, if used wisely, the EH-WSN would never break down, except for hardware failure.8–11 However, it is important to note that because of the stochastic nature of EH procedures, the harvested energy cannot transfer in a steady and uninterrupted fashion. Thus, a method for accurate energy allocation is essential for the EH-WSN system.
In a normal EH-WSN for SHM, sensor nodes are always deployed in strategic locations to capture the building’s dynamic response precisely and sensitively. The process of node deployment is regarded as the selection of the best locations to gather data on the building’s status, while routing is considered to be finding a continuous path with good connectivity from the source node to the sink.12–14 Since routing is significantly influenced by the node’s location and energy status, a joint optimization of node deployment and its corresponding routing is very necessary for highly efficient and reliable wireless structure monitoring.
In this article, we consider and analyze an EH-WSN system where all sensor nodes share access to a common EH module and storage battery. Here, the common EH module should be installed on the building roof or exterior of the structure and harvest energy from solar, wind, and other sources, whereas indoor nodes do not possess their own EH modules. The EH rate of this single external EH module is
Recently, the joint optimization of sensor placement and routing for WSN has been widely studied in previous studies.15–21 ZA Eu et al. 15 have optimized network performance by finding the optimal routing algorithm and relay node placement scheme for EH-WSN. They researched metrics including network throughput, goodput, source sending rate, efficiency, data delivery ratio, and hop count. J Skulic et al. 16 proposed a methodology for calculating the optimal placement of sensor nodes in linear network topologies (along the length of a bridge). Both simple packet relay and network coding are considered for the routing of the collected data packets toward two sink nodes positioned at both ends of the bridge. S Halder and D Sipra 17 find node density as the parameter that has a significant influence on network lifetime and derive desired parameter values for balanced energy consumption. Their simulation results show that their proposed node deployment algorithm performs better on coverage connectivity, energy balance, and network lifetime. C Yang and K-W Chin 18 aim to determine the locations to place the minimum number of nodes required for sensing and relaying that covers all targets and have an optimal path to the sink under energy-neutral operations. They propose two heuristics to accomplish this task, but the EH rate remains the same for all sensor nodes, making it an unrealistic approach for actual applications. M Dong et al. 19 propose a novel protocol which jointly optimizes the energy and delay efficiency under reliable constraint in a cluster-based WSN, result shows that it can increase the network lifetime by more than 8% and reduce network delay by more than 25%. F Mansourkiaie et al. 20 present an optimal solution to maximize the lifetime of WSN for SHM by joint use of optimal power and route selection. Especially, Elsersy et al. 21 introduce a joint formulation that optimizes placement, routing, and flow assignment in a normal WSN for SHM. A genetic algorithm (GA)-based solution is designed and some parameters such as information quality, total energy consumption, and their normalized ratio are analyzed and optimized.
Our work intends to both maximize the information quality and minimize the power consumption under EH constraints. We design an efficient and reliable energy distribution method along with a corresponding node placement algorithm and a routing protocol. To the best of our knowledge, this article is the first to consider the network utility of EH-WSN in SHM. The main results and innovations are as follows:
A novel formulation that can jointly optimize node placement, network routing, and energy allocation has been introduced. The optimized result can meet both civil engineering demands and networking requirements.
We propose an optimization algorithm using the effective independence model based on the Fisher information matrix (FIM). The novel algorithm achieves a high-accuracy near-optimal solution.
We evaluate the performance of our algorithm. Results show that the algorithm efficiently allocates the harvested energy to each individual node, significantly reduces the outage probability of the deployed network, and notably improves the information quality.
The remainder of this article is as follows: Section “System model” presents the system model of our EH-WSN for SHM. Section “The problem” introduces the new formulation of the node deployment, routing, and energy allocation optimization problem. Section “Solution” shows a greedy search-based approach for finding a near-optimal solution. Section “Numerical results” analyzes and compares the experimental results of the proposed algorithm. Finally, section “Conclusion” summarizes the article and looks to the future.
System model
In this section, we discuss the system model and the assumptions made to mathematically represent its parameters. Specifically, the following subsections present the framework with respect to energy dynamics, packet transmission, node placement, and information quality.
Energy dynamics and packet transfer
The designed monitoring system under study is shown in Figure 1, where

System architecture of our EH-WSN for SHM.
In each epoch, node
At the start of an epoch, every node sends out its individual energy request to the shared battery, with node
In the proposed monitoring system, the sensor nodes communicate with their receivers over
where
Correspondingly, the receiving energy requirement for node
While node
here,
Node placement and information quality
In the proposed EH-WSN for SHM, nodes are deployed in select locations to collect data reflecting the structure status. To ensure the effectiveness of this EH-WSN, the sensor node deployment must be energy-efficient and possess high information quality. The sensor node deployment method using the effective independence model is a deployment algorithm that arranges sensor locations subject to the FIM results:
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The core idea is a local search among all possible locations. It takes the following input parameters: the structure vibration pattern (known as the “modal shape”); the set of candidate locations (
The sensor deployment scheme in SHM can be described as discovering a location indicator set
here,
here, R is the covariance matrix account for the noise in the modal shape measurements. Let
here,
The problem
We are now ready to define the
Then, we have the joint MNMQN optimization problem
Maximize
Subject to
The formula has the following constraints, as defined in the indicated equations: equation (10) enforces that the number of chosen nodes must be same as
We can see that the MNMQN aims to choose the suitable nodes, determine their routing sequence (which also determines the energy cost of the sensor nodes), and compute the minimum number of sensor nodes to sustain optimal monitoring performance, which is the ultimate aim. Moreover, the total energy consumed by nodes is no greater than the energy harvested. In this respect, the MNMQN will deploy sufficient sensor nodes to satisfy constraints under a given
Solution
Since node deployment is represented by a binary variable, it is convenient to execute and operate in an optimization algorithm. We can use an efficient non-exhaustive search method to find the optimal solution. In this article, such methods are adopted to deploy nodes and discover routes to maximize information quality and maintain the total energy consumption less than but most close to the energy harvested by the common EH module.
We call a solution of the optimization problem a chromosome. It is assembled by a list of variables called genes. It contains two main parts: in the first node placement part, there are

Solution representations with placement and routing.
For example, if we want to select 4 locations out of 10 potential locations, the first random placement part could be shown as follows, in which locations

Example of solution representation: (a) placement and (b) routing.
We randomly produce a certain number of solutions to develop an initial population, and then, the solutions that fit equations (10)–(14) survive and move on to the next step. Based on these generated solutions, energy request
Numerical results
In this part, we evaluate the performance of the proposed joint MNMQN mechanism with a common experimental mechanism. This mechanism is characterized by a random node placement scheme, a shortest path routing model (Dijkstra’s algorithm)
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and a uniform energy allocation strategy where
Simulation parameters.
EH: energy harvesting.
We simulate and evaluate the performance of our algorithm in a supposed 10-floor tower. The building’s height is considered to be 30 m and the floor height is 3 m. A two-dimensional plane graph is shown in Figure 4, where the sink node’s position is assumed to be (0, 0) and the potential candidate EH nodes with a total number

The 10-floor tower of

The normalized information quality versus number of nodes.
It is apparent that the index
Next, to investigate the total energy consumption

The energy consumption request versus the number of nodes.
Similar to the former measurement, MNMQN automatically calculates the optimal number of sensor nodes and the corresponding individual energy requests, while the random strategy computes average energy consumption requests after the number value has been set. Only successful routing results can advance to the following statistical analysis stage (average operation). Its energy consumption increases when the number of nodes increases because there is more traffic flowing through the network. From Figure 6 it is clear that the MNMQN algorithm consumes a relatively small amount of energy than the harvested power during one time slot.
Then, the ratio

Finally, we research the MNMQN’s performance when the EH rate changes. If the EH rate increases, then the energy harvested increases. Therefore the number of nodes that can be supported also increases, which improves the information quality. Figure 8 captures the changes of

Changes of metrics as the EH rate varies.
In conclusion, these simulations indicate that the proposed joint optimization MNMQN mechanism offers the best combination of system monitoring information and individual node energy utilization and has also been analytically shown to be applicable and truthful.
Conclusion
This work proposes a novel formulation that jointly optimizes the placement, routing, and energy allocation for an EH-WSN used in SHM. Its aim is to determine the minimum number of sensor nodes and their corresponding locations such that the target structure can be continuously monitored as much as possible and maximize the sensor information quality while ensuring that the system is energy neutral. Numerical simulations are evaluated for a 10-floor tower to analyze the performance of the proposed algorithm. Parameters such as information quality, total energy consumption, and their normalized ratio have been analyzed and reviewed. The results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm. Future work will focus on the proposal of a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for EH-WSN and consider cluster-based topology structures.
