Ad-hoc performance of wireless sensor network for large scale civil and construction engineering applications

Currently available wireless sensor networks (WSNs) provide the potential for collecting and monitoring construction job-site information in an efficient way. However, the unique characteristic of large scale and complicated job-site layout makes it difficult to reliably adopt WSNs. As the wireless network becomes denser, increased network traffic may degrade the overall reliability of the data acquisition system. In this paper, a numerical simulation with the IEEE802.15.4 standard was conducted to analyze the packet reception rate and the number of received bits using channel clear probability. In addition, a case study was implemented to evaluate the network traffic congestion, by configuring an ad-hoc network topology with the commercial product of the ZigBee module. It is confirmed that the reliability of the ad-hoc network is degraded due to the increased signal traffic caused by the increased number of active nodes, hop counts, transmission intervals, etc.

► We evaluate network traffic performance for construction applications.
► Network performance is affected by hop count, node size, and transmission interval.
► High traffic density decreases reliability and applicability of wireless communication.
► Transmission interval is a major factor for negative performance of WSN.