Development of a Zigbee-Based Wireless Sensor Network of MEMS Accelerometers for Pavement Monitoring

Safety related to pavement ageing is a major issue, as cracks and holes in the road surface can lead to severe accidents. Although pavement maintenance is extremely costly, detecting a deterioration before its surface becomes completely damaged remains a challenge. Current approaches still use wired sensors, which consume a lot of energy and are expensive; further to that, wired sensors may become damaged during installation. To avoid the use of cables, in this work, a prototype of a Zigbee-based wireless sensor network for pavement monitoring was developed and tested in the laboratory. The system consists of a slave sensor and a roadside unit; the slave sensor sends wireless acceleration data to the master, and the master saves the received acceleration dataset in a csv file. Further data processing can be performed in the master on this acceleration dataset. Two laboratory tests were performed for dynamic calibration and simulating five-axle truck pavement displacement. The preliminary results showed that the Zigbee-based wireless sensor network is capable of capturing the required ranges of displacement, acceleration, and frequency. The ADXL354 sensor was found to be the most appropriate accelerometer for this application, with as small as 155 uA power consumption.