Demonstration of Low Power and Low Cost Wireless Sensor Network with Edge Computing

Abstract

With development of Internet of Things (IOT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used for many applications. Due to the advantage of automatic information collection and analysis, WSNs received a lot of attention in structural health monitoring. Integrating the sensor technology, embedded technology, information processing technology and wireless communication technology, the monitoring for the structural health condition could be done by real-time. Meanwhile, some precaution can be made by connecting the WSN to the cloud and using big data analysis technology. However, for one board system, the more information processing, the more power consumption there would be. On the other side, the power is the most important parameter for WSNs. In this paper, we proposed a new WSN node with low cost and low power by using an ARM Cortex-M4® microcontroller and an BLE-4.0 module and/or RF transceiver module for wireless connection. Moreover, a new strategy based on the edge computing technology is also embedded in the system. When nodes operate, it would analyze the event first that upload the processing task to the master node or just execute this task locally. Other than this event, the node goes to sleep mode and only wakes up by sensing and processing. Test results show that this method is more feasible and adaptive than other methods.