An application of smart dust for pavement condition monitoring
Nadim A. Ferzli, Richard A. Ivey, Timothy I. King, Colby J. Sandburg, Jin‐Song Pei, Musharraf M. Zaman, Hazem H. Refai, Hung Jr. Lin, Aaron Landrum, Rory Victor · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2006
Pavement maintenance is vital for travel safety; detecting road weather conditions using a wireless sensing network poses many challenges due to the harsh environment. This paper presents some preliminary results of an ongoing effort of applying "Smart Dust" sensor network for monitoring pavement temperature and moisture condition to detect icy road condition. Careful considerations yield effective solutions to various hardware and software development issues including the selection of sensors and antenna, design of casing, interfacing motes with alien sensors and programming of motes. A series of experiments is carried out to study traffic interference to packet delivery performance of a small-scale sensor network in a pseudo-field environment. In addition, several overnight tests are conducted to study the performance of motes operated under a power efficient condition. The results are analyzed and challenges are identified in this smart sensing application. The aforementioned research activities would benefit robust real-world implementations of off-the-shelf sensor network products.