On the design of an embedded wireless sensor network for aircraft vibration monitoring using efficient game theoretic based MAC protocol

This paper presents the design of a wireless sensor network architecture suitable for monitoring vibration on an aircraft. The main objective is to improve the flight safety by detecting vibration intensity among all the components of the airplane structure and communicating this information to the cockpit computer to react before any component can reach resonance. Therefore, the study of sensor nodes deployment for specific types of airplanes and the definition of appropriate network topology are conducted. Furthermore, to enhance the responsiveness of the structural health monitoring system, a medium access protocol based on game theory was developed. The main idea is to adjust the wake time period of a sensor node according to the sensed vibration level. This parameter will be used to configure the game-based medium access protocol. The performance evaluation work shows that the proposed vibration and game-based communication scheme enhances the transmission efficiency as it reduces the packet loss and the average transmission delay.