INTERFERENCE CHARACTERISTICS OF CONSTRUCTION ENVIRONMENT FOR WSN APPLICATIONS

Advent of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has provided potentials to a variety of construction applications. It is well appreciated that WSNs have advantages over traditional wired system, such as ease of installation and maintenance with increased cost savings and efficiencies. However, the obstruction of wireless signal from physical objects in the heterogeneous construction environment often brings challenges to WSN measurement system. This paper analyzed the obstruction characteristic of construction environment where construction materials, equipment, and built structures obstruct the wireless signal yielding negative effect of measurement system. By adopting evaluation criteria, such as packet reception rate, field experiments have been implemented to quantitatively identify the interference of wireless signal from penetration, reflection, and network traffic under the construction environment. The results show that reliable performance of wireless sensor in construction environment depends on the optimal separation distance between a receiver and a transmitter, obstruction types, obstruction thickness, and transmission interval. In addition, the methodology and experimental results of this paper could be used in the practical design of network topology when hundreds of sensor nodes form a mesh network in the large scale construction applications.