2011 8th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks

A Power-Efficient Wireless Sensor Network for

Continuously Monitoring Seismic Vibrations
B. Weiss , H.L. Truong , W. Schott , A. Munari , C. Lombriser , U. Hunkeler , P. Chevillat

IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, 8803 Ruschlikon, Switzerland, Email: {wei,hlt,sct,cll,pch}@zurich.ibm.com

University of Padova, 3531 Padova, Italy, Email: munari@dei.unipd.it
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland, Email: urs.hunkeler@epfl.ch

As network nodes may be spread over a wide geographic

area, the WVSN has to support forwarding of data
packets from the wireless sensor devices to the backend
applications by an efficient routing algorithm.
As network nodes are battery-powered, the WVSN has
to support an efficient power-saving strategy to provide
a network lifetime of several months while continuously
sensing vibrations.
As the network nodes must be awake simultaneously to
communicate with each other and vibration events should
be time-stamped, all nodes of the WVSN have to be
tightly synchronized.
As nodes may be added to or removed from the network at any time, the WVSN topology has to be selfconfigurable to keep the nodes of the network connected.
As the applications are usually executed on a remote
backend server, the WVSN has to provide a messaging
mechanism to forward data from the sensors to the server.
In this paper, we will present a novel power-efficient wireless sensor network for continuously monitoring and analyzing
seismic vibrations with sensor nodes and forwarding the information retrieved with low-cost relay nodes from the sensors
to the backend applications. The vibration-sensing algorithms
conform to the DIN 4150-3 norm [1]. All nodes are batterypowered and equipped with an IEEE 802.15.4 compatible
radio transceiver [2]. The nodes communicate with each other
by executing a novel networking protocol stack, which we call
WVSN stack. It executes all network functions and uses the
advanced publish/subscribe messaging protocol MQTT-S [3]
for the communication between sensor nodes and backend
applications. We evaluated the performance of the WVSN
solution in certification and field tests. The results show that
the vibration-sensing algorithms operate according to the DIN
norm and that the WVSN offers excellent performance in
terms of packet delivery rate, latency, and power efficiency.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews related work. Section 3 presents the overall architecture of the
wireless vibration sensor network. Details on the node and
network architecture are given in Sections 4 and 5. Section 6
describes the messaging functions interfacing the WVSN and
the backend applications. In Section 7, some implementation
issues are discussed. Section 8 presents the results of field tests
obtained with a WVSN prototype implementation. Concluding
remarks are given in Section 9.

AbstractWe present a novel power-efficient wireless sensor

network for continuously monitoring and analyzing seismic
vibrations with sensor nodes and forwarding the retrieved
information with low-cost relay nodes to backend applications.
The applied vibration sensing algorithms are derived from the
DIN 4150-3 standard. All nodes in the network are batterypowered and equipped with an IEEE 802.15.4 compatible radio
transceiver. The nodes communicate with each other by executing
a novel power-efficient protocol stack, which provides all network
functions required by the vibration-sensing application and uses a
publish/subscribe messaging protocol for communicating between
the network nodes and the backend applications. Results obtained
in certification and field tests show that the proposed vibrationsensing solution is standard-compliant, and that the wireless
vibration sensor network (WVSN) exhibits excellent performance
in terms of packet delivery rate, latency, and power efficiency.
Index TermsSeismic vibration sensing, power-efficient networking, publish/subscribe middleware, field tests

I. I NTRODUCTION
Continuously monitoring seismic vibration events generated
by earthquakes, drilling activities, and moving heavy machinery or vehicles, and thoroughly analyzing the measurements
to detect potentially harmful vibrations for buildings, bridges,
dams, and pipelines are important to prevent disasters or environmental catastrophes. To this end, low-cost battery-powered
sensor devices are now ready to be used thanks to the advances
made in MEMS-based sensor technology and programmable
low-power signal-processing hardware components. In the
application scenario envisioned, sensor devices are positioned
at several geographic locations close to the foundation of the
building to measure the vibration acceleration. Each device
autonomously computes the maximum amplitude and dominant frequency of the vibration velocity at its location. If the
computed values exceed pre-defined threshold values, an alarm
is generated. To take the right action in case of an alarm and to
continuously trace parameter values of non-harmful vibrations,
the alarm signals as well as the vibration data retrieved are
forwarded from the sensors via a basestation (BS) to backend
applications for processing and control purposes. This can be
achieved by deploying an advanced low-power WVSN in the
field surrounding the building that comprises sensor devices,
additional relay nodes, and a gateway (GW) to connect the
nodes to backend applications that typically reside on servers
in an enterprise network.
Several challenging requirements have to be taken into
account when developing a wireless vibration sensor network:

978-1-4577-0093-4/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

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II. R ELATED W ORK

Measuring seismic vibrations using wireless sensor networks has recently become an active area of research. The
main advantages of using wireless sensors instead of wired
ones are ease of deployment and low installation costs, which
are estimated to be at $ 1000 per wireless channel as opposed
to $ 5000 per wired channel [4].
Monitoring vibrations over an extended time period requires
low-power wireless communication devices. As these devices
typically transmit data at low rates, the total bandwidth available for collecting the sensed information at a BS is limited
to a low value. For example, the 64 sensors of the wireless
sensor network deployed at the Golden Gate Bridge [5] fill up
their 512 kB memory by sampling vibration waveforms at a
rate of 1 kHz. As up to 46 hops are required for forwarding
the sensed data to the BS, about 12 hours are needed for data
collection. This time can be shortened by using compression
algorithms [6].
Many applications do not need the vibration waveforms, but
only require a few parameter values of the sensed information.
Therefore, Hackmann et al. [7] monitor the health of building
structures by periodically performing a distributed version of
frequency domain decomposition. For each analysis, a sensor
node collects 18,432 samples at a rate of 560 Hz, performs a
4096-point fast Fourier transform (FFT), and transmits only
the data associated with the locally-detected natural frequencies to the BS for correlating the information. This algorithm
can run in 105.48 s, while consuming an energy of 44.38 J.
Another way to lower the power consumption and to reduce
the amount of data to be collected is to take into account
specific properties of the vibration sensing application. For
example, the BriMon network [8] monitors railway bridges
only during train passages. The network nodes sleep most of
the time and only periodically wake up to listen for incoming
trains. For continuous sampling, however, sensors can only be
put to sleep if their wake-up times are sufficiently short.
If more processing power is needed, specially designed
FPGAs or ASICs can provide parallel processing at low power
cost. Liu et al. [9] presented a sensor node that uses a FPGA to
process the sensed waveforms at sample rates of up to 20 MHz
with a current consumption of 110 mA. As low-power FPGAs
have limited resources, efficient algorithms for implementing
a FFT and peak detection are required [10].
Wireless sensor nodes are usually powered by batteries,
whose capacities determine the maximum measurement duration. For a long lifetime, a careful choice of the hardware
components of the nodes and management of their power
states are thus very important. Lowest power consumption can
be achieved using passive sensors that mechanically store the
sensed information and are periodically read to detect changes
of the stored values [11]. The lifetime can also be extended
by using energy scavenging. The GFZ-WISE sensor array
for earthquake damage detection [12], for example, employs
sensor nodes consuming 4.5 W which can even continuously
run when powered by a 40 Ah battery or a 60 W solar panel.

Fig. 1. Overall architecture of wireless vibration sensor network. Wireless

nodes with vibration-sensing capabilities are depicted as white rectangles,
whereas relay nodes are shaded.

III. OVERALL N ETWORK A RCHITECTURE

Fig. 1 shows the overall architecture of the proposed wireless sensor network for monitoring and analyzing vibrations
caused by seismic activities. It comprises a large number
of battery-powered wireless nodes being spread over a wide
geographical area surrounding the building monitored and a
mains-powered gateway that is connected to a backend server.
Some of the nodes are equipped with accelerometers to sense
potentially harmful vibrations. The remaining wireless nodes
ensure network connectivity for hop-by-hop forwarding the
information retrieved from the sensor nodes to the GW; they
are therefore called relay nodes. The sensing functions are
always active for continuous vibration monitoring, whereas
the radio functions of all nodes are periodically put asleep to
minimize energy consumption.
Vibrations on the structure of buildings can be detected
by applying the rules and methods specified in DIN 41503. From this norm, the following signal-processing algorithm
has been derived and implemented in each sensor node: We
continuously analyze the accelerometer samples {ax }, {ay },
and {az } monitored in each consecutive time window of size
T = 1s by computing the maximum absolute value |vi |max of
the vibration velocity and its corresponding time stamp ti , and
the dominating frequency fi of the vibration velocity spectrum
for each coordinate i = x, y, and z. The parameters |vi |max
are then compared with threshold values vth (fi ) where the
function vth (f ) is given by the DIN norm. If |vi |max < vth (fi )
for each i, no harmful vibration is detected and the following
actions are performed:
store parameter values fi , ti and |vi |max , and
transmit the parameter values as continuous data to the
backend application at the next point in time when the
WVSN becomes active.
If |vi |max vth (fi ) for any i, a harmful vibration is detected
and the following actions are performed:
store parameter values fi , ti , |vi |max and all acceleration
samples {ai } monitored in the time window,
transmit stored parameter values fi , ti , |vi |max , and an
alarm indicator to the backend application at the next
point in time when the WVSN becomes active, and
upload stored acceleration samples {ai } as exception data
upon request of a backend application.

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Fig. 2.

Architecture of the wireless sensor node with sensing capabilities.

Communication among wireless nodes is handled through

the WVSN stack operating on top of an IEEE 802.15.4
physical layer transmitting in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. The stack
controls and coordinates the access of the nodes to the wireless
medium using a TDMA policy. It achieves the necessary time
synchronization by accessing a GPS time reference. Moreover,
it provides procedures to reliably exchange data between a
node and the GW. This includes discovering new nodes in the
network, probing the quality of wireless links, and building
routing paths. On top of the WVSN stack, a MQTT-S based
publish/subscribe protocol is implemented. A thin application
layer can access this middleware to gather vibration sensor
data and to deliver them to the backend applications.

Fig. 3. Architecture of vibration sensing processing unit without functions

required to time-multiplex the computation of the x, y, and z components of
vibration signals.

detector, FFT processing, alarm detector, and VSPU-NVRAM

controller interface as shown in Fig. 3.
The acceleration data acquisition unit processes the acceleration sample sequences {ax }, {ay }, and {az } by limiting
their signal bandwidth with a low-pass filter to 128 Hz and
downsampling them to the target sampling rate of 256 Hz. The
down-converted samples are written into the ring buffer that
provides four buffer elements for each axis. Each element can
store a frame of 256 successive samples of 16 bits in size. Each
frame has a length of 1 s and is marked with an index n. After
having stored at least three frames for each coordinate, the
remaining digital processing units start analyzing the recorded
information. As these units process the samples at a processing
rate ffast that is at least six times higher than 256 Hz, the
processing of the x, y, and z samples is performed in a timemultiplexed fashion with a single hardware realization. Next,
we provide further details on these signal-processing units
without discussing time-multiplexing issues.
The integrator computes the vibration velocity frame from
the acceleration information recorded. For each frame n, the
integrator iteratively accumulates 512 acceleration samples
stored in the ring buffer, where 256 out of the 512 samples are
taken from the n-th buffer element, and the remaining samples
are taken partly from the preceding element n 1 and partly
from the succeeding element n + 1 as illustrated in Fig. 3.
The dynamic range of the integrator input signal is extended
to 18 bits, and an accumulator under- or overflow leads to a
saturation of the integrator output signal. The 512 samples
of the computed vibration velocity are forwarded to the peak
detector and stored in a serial-in/parallel-out shift register. The
peak detector iteratively searches for the maximum absolute
value |vi |max of the vibration velocity and its corresponding
timestamp ti by monitoring the vibration velocity samples at
the integrator output. The detected parameters are fed to the
alarm detector, the serial-in/parallel-out shift register, and to
the VSPU-NVRAM controller interface.
The FFT processing unit computes the dominant frequency
fi of the monitored vibration velocity at time n by analyzing
256 successive samples of the 512 vibration velocity samples

IV. S ENSOR N ODE A RCHITECTURE

Fig. 2 shows the architecture and the main hardware components of a wireless sensor node. It comprises the sensing
module and the radio networking module. The architecture
of a relay node can be obtained by deactivating all functions
related to vibration sensing.
The radio networking module is implemented with an
IRIS Mote radio and processor platform that carries a radio
transceiver and a low-power microcontroller. The physical
layer of the radio transceiver is compatible with the IEEE
802.15.4 standard; it operates in the 2.4 GHz ISM frequency
band with a data rate of 256 kbps. The microcontroller is an
8-bit RISC processor with 128 kB program memory and 8 kB
internal static RAM. On the controller, the operating system
TinyOS v2.1 is executed which constitutes the programming
platform for running the WVSN stack and the MQTT-S client.
The sensing module carries a 3-axis accelerometer, a multichannel analog-to-digital converter (ADC), a non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM), and a field-programmable
gate array (FPGA) as main components. The MEMS-based
accelerometer measures the vibration acceleration along the
x, y, and z axis. It covers a dynamic range of 2 g and
provides a minimum resolution of 0.5 mg over a bandwidth
of 100 Hz. Each of the three acceleration signals are bandlimited by a low-pass filter with a cut-off frequency of 128 Hz
before they are analog-to-digital converted with a 16-bit ADC
at a rate of 2.048 kHz. The digital samples are fed via a serial
peripheral interface to a low-power FPGA that carries the
vibration sensing processing unit (VSPU) and several interface
control-logic modules.
The VSPU implements the vibration-sensing algorithm as
specified in Section III. It comprises the signal-processing
units acceleration data acquisition, ring buffer, integrator, peak

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stored in the serial-in/parallel-out shift register. Based on the

timestamp ti provided by the peak detector, the samples are
taken from the register so that the sample with the maximum
absolute value is in the center of the newly formed frame.
The unit processes the frame in parallel at a rate of ffast /256.
First, the frame is weighted with a Hanning window of length
256 centered at time ti . Then, the samples are transformed
to the frequency domain with a 256-point FFT that provides
256 values of the corresponding frequency spectrum between
-127 and 128 Hz. The dominant frequency fi is obtained by
searching for the maximum value of the magnitude of the
spectrum. Finally, the value fi is forwarded to the alarm
detector and the VSPU-NVRAM controller interface.
The alarm detector indicates a harmful vibration if the
maximum absolute value |vi |max of the vibration velocity
exceeds a threshold value vth (fi ) for any i = x, y, and
z. The appropriate threshold function vth (f ) is downloaded
into a look-up table of the detector at the inital setup of the
sensor node. Depending on the alarm indicator, the VSPUNVRAM-controller-interface writes for each frame n either a
continuous data packet or both a continuous and an exception
data packet to the NVRAM. The continuous data packet has a
length of 96 bits and carries the parameter values of n, |vi |max ,
ti , fi , and the alarm indicator. The exception data packet has
a length of 12.32 kbits and encompasses, besides the frame
index and alarm indicator, the associated acceleration samples
{ai } which can be retrieved from the ring buffer. Finally,
both packets downloaded to the NVRAM are ready to be
transmitted by the radio network module.

overhead, we opted for a centralized network architecture, in

which the NCC knows the overall network topology and is
therefore able to compute the required routing information
and the corresponding TDMA schedule for all nodes. This
architecture also simplifies the implementation of the required
functions on network nodes and allows a more optimized
operation through global knowledge when compared with a
distributed architecture.
Each WVSN node is operated in either management or
synchronized mode. The management mode is used for network setup and configuration, and provides a fallback mode if
connectivity is lost. In this mode, the node provides functions
to discover the network, estimate link qualities, configure the
node, and obtain status or debug information. To support
these functions, a node keeps its radio transceiver continuously
enabled to receive commands issued by the NCC, which uses
source routing to route messages and a carrier sense multiple
access (CSMA) scheme to transmit them. In the synchronized
mode, the wireless nodes are synchronized to a common
reference time that is sliced into periodically repeated superframes. Based on configuration information received from
the NCC during network setup and at the beginning of each
superframe, the nodes can receive and send sensor data in
dedicated time slot or exchange control information with the
NCC in a contention frame. In particular, all nodes follow the
TDMA schedule provided by the NCC to switch their radio
transceivers and microcontrollers on for sending and receiving,
and off for sleeping.

V. N ETWORK A RCHITECTURE

In management mode, the NCC constructs and configures

the network by sequentially executing the following procedures:
1) Network discovery: To identify all nodes in the cluster,
the NCC requests the BS to broadcast a series of neighborhood
discovery messages, collect the identifiers of the responding
nodes, and report them back to the NCC for entry into its
network node list. The NCC then iteratively instructs all newly
discovered nodes to search for their own neighbors and report
the identifiers discovered back to the NCC. Network discovery
ends after all nodes have reported their neighbors.
2) Link probing: To assess the quality of each link, the
NCC instructs each node to iteratively request each of its
neighbors to transmit link probe messages. The percentage
of successfully received messages for each link together with
the average received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and link
quality indicator (LQI) are reported back to the NCC.
3) Routing: Based on the node discovery and link probing
results, the NCC computes a weighted directed graph. After
assigning low weights to good quality links, the routing
algorithm searches for the path with lowest total weight from
each node to the BS. The combined paths form the routing
tree with the BS as root.
4) TDMA scheduling: After learning the routing tree and
the amount of traffic generated by each node, the NCC
determines the TDMA schedule that controls the timely access

A. Network setup and configuration

Fig. 4 shows the protocol architecture of the proposed

WVSN solution encompassing the networking stack with
cluster control functions, the MQTT-S messaging middleware,
and application software. The vibration-sensing application
executed on the sensor nodes uses the middleware to forward
continuous and exception data to the vibration-monitoring
application executed on the backend server. To transmit data
hop-by-hop to the gateway, the networking stack is run on the
wireless nodes and the BS, whereas the MQTT-S protocol
transports the application data from the gateway via the
MQTT-S broker to the backend application. All wireless nodes
are controlled and managed by the network cluster control
(NCC). In the case of a large number of nodes, the network
can be further split into multiple clusters with separate NCCs,
which are centrally controlled by the global network control.
The design of the WVSN stack was mainly driven by the
requirement for low energy consumption. In wireless sensor
networks, energy is often unnecessarily consumed because
of idle listening, overhearing, transmission collisions, and
protocol overhead. As data are generated very regularly in
the application scenario considered, the first three sources
for wasting energy can be avoided by using a time division
multiple access (TDMA) protocol that ensures that only one
sender and one or several associated receivers are accessing
the wireless medium at any point in time. To reduce the control

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Fig. 4.

Protocol architecture of WVSN solution. Clusters of WVSN are controlled by the network cluster control (NCC) and a global network control.

of the nodes to the wireless medium in the synchronized mode.

The following algorithm is applied to assign time slots to a
node for sending packets as soon as its transmit queue contains
more than a predefined number T of messages:
Assign to each node the number of messages mj it has
to send.
Using a breadth-first search, find a node j with minimal
hop count having at least mj T messages to send. If
no such node can be found, select the last node with at
least one message to send.
Assign as many send slots to the node as needed to empty
its message queue. Its parent p is configured for receiving
during these slots.
Set the number of messages to send for the node to 0
and add mj to the parents queue m0p = mp + mj .
Repeat steps 2 to 4 until all messages have reached the
BS.
5) Node configuration: The NCC configures every network
node separately by transmitting configuration messages which
contain the individual slot numbers for sending and receiving,
the address of the parent, and a configuration ID.

lengths, which can be enabled by the NCC for all or single

superframes, or on request of any node for some designated
frames. Moreover, the frames either are slotted to allow the
NCC to give exclusive access rights to one sending and (at
least) one associated receiving node, or are open for any node
to access the medium using CSMA within the frame. When the
superframe is not occupied by a frame, all nodes are sleeping.
As depicted in Fig. 5, four types of frames are defined for
the TDMA superframe structure:
1) Synchronization frame: This frame is time-slotted, and
its first slot is used by the BS to broadcast synchronization
beacons to the first-level nodes of the routing tree. Each
parent node in the tree has a slot assigned to forward the
synchronization beacons to its children. Network nodes only
wake up during a slot, in which they either expect to receive
a synchronization beacon from their parent or transmit it to
their children, and sleep on during the remaining time slots
of the frame. The beacon message serves several purposes: It
contains configuration information for the current superframe,
such as which frames are enabled, when the superframe ends
and the next one will start, and allows children nodes to
synchronize with their parent. It also contains the configuration
ID that will be used by the node to verify the validity of
the synchronization information. A beacon may also piggyback a source-routed message for any network node, which is
forwarded by the individual parent nodes to their children.
2) Collection frame: This frame is used by sensor nodes
to transmit continuous data packets to their parents and from
there to the BS. The frame is slotted to guarantee that each
sender can send its message to its associated receiver without
interference of neighbor transmissions. Each node stores the
message to be sent in a queue, from which a message is only
removed if the receiver has acknowledged its reception or after
a certain number of retransmissions. When the queue is empty,
the node goes to sleep until its next active slot.
3) Listening frame: This frame can be enabled by the NCC
to put some or all network nodes into receive mode for a
certain time. This allows newly joined nodes or nodes that
lost synchronization to announce themselves to the network
by broadcasting a message in this frame using CSMA. To
help these nodes synchronize to the superframe, the beacon
messages carry a timestamp indicating the start of the listening
frame. Nodes having received an announcement forward this
information to the NCC, which then decides how to react to

B. Synchronized operation
The NCC starts synchronizing the WVSN nodes by requesting the BS to execute a simple, but reliable time synchronization protocol that is derived from [13]. The BS, which
obtains a global reference time from a GPS receiver, acts as
a timing source for all nodes. It distributes the reference time
by broadcasting a synchronization beacon to its children. To
reduce the risk of losing beacons due to transmission errors,
it is transmitted several times. After receiving a beacon, the
nodes readjust their time reference by taking into account the
arrival time of the beacon and the processing delay between
the nodes. Each node then forwards its adjusted timing information to its children. The synchronization procedure is
iterated until all nodes in the network have been reached. After
having been synchronzied, the nodes turn their radio on and
off according to the TDMA schedule provided by the BS.
C. Medium access strategy and TDMA superframe structure
In synchronized mode, the access to the radio medium
and the timely execution of the various network tasks are
controlled according to the TDMA superframe structure. Each
superframe is divided into frames of different types and

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Fig. 5.

TDMA superframe structure used in synchronized mode of WVSN.

the newly discovered nodes.

4) Exception frame: This frame is used by network nodes
to transfer exception data from the sensor nodes to the BS.
When a sensor node issues an alarm, the NCC enables an
exception frame and requests the node to upload this information. During this frame, all parents of this node are awake for
receiving and forwarding the data to the BS.
To ensure that data packets are reliably transmitted hopby-hop over the radio channels, an IEEE 802.15.4 based
retransmssion protocol is applied at each radio link. Sending
nodes thus retransmit packets if they do not receive an acknowledgement from the receiving node in time. The time
required for potential retransmission has to be taken into
account when calculating the TDMA schedule to prevent the
transmit queue of nodes with high traffic load from becoming
congested because of missing transmission bandwidth.

Fig. 6.

Implementation of wireless vibration sensor.

corresponds to the one specified in [3], whereas the vibrationsensing application executed on the sensor nodes uses a
modified API that is optimized to work with the WVSN stack
and satisfies the low-power and timing requirements of the
application. This is reflected in Fig. 4 by adding a to the
MQTT-S client.
Before a MQTT-S client can communicate with the broker, it has to set up a session with the broker, inform the
broker about its identity and the topics it will use during
the session, and maintain the session by regularly sending a
keep-alive message to the broker. Instead of sending MQTT-S
messages through the network, we perform a cross-layer
optimization by making use of information already gathered
by the gateway during WVSN setup and configuration. The
message processor, which is part of the gateway, generates
the actual subscriptions as it already knows the identity and
the subscription topics of the sensor nodes after setting up the
underlying network. In addition, keep-alive messages are not
generated as long as the corresponding sensor nodes operate
according to the TDMA schedule.
When receiving messages destined for a certain sensor node
over the MQTT-S client, the message processor adds the
required source routing information so that the relay nodes
can route them to the correct receiver. It also applies a similar
routing function to the control and management messages
exchanged between the NCC and the wireless nodes.

D. Network recovery
Node failures and varying link qualities are common in lowpower wireless sensor networks and often lead to dynamic
changes of the network topology. A node operated in the
synchronized mode detects a synchronization loss after having
not received any synchronization beacon from its parent for a
certain time. In this case, the node switches to management
mode and continuously listens on the radio channel. If the
node again receives beacons from its parent with the original configuration ID, it immediately returns to synchronized
operation. If the node receives unknown beacons, it waits for
a listening frame and announces itself to the network. The
announcements are forwarded to the NCC, which wakes up
parts of the network in a subsequent superframe for performing
a local node discovery and link probing. With the information
provided by these functions, the NCC generates a new routing
tree and TDMA schedule, which are imposed on the WVSN by
first stopping its operation, reconfiguring the nodes, and then
restarting synchronized operation with the new configuration.

VII. I MPLEMENTATION RESULTS

The WVSN has been prototyped to demonstrate its implementation feasibility and to evaluate the performance of
the sensing and networking functions applied. This section
describes the results we obtained by implementing the network
and performing various experiments in the laboratory.
A. Wireless sensor node

VI. M ESSAGING M IDDLEWARE

Fig. 6 shows the implementation of the wireless vibration

sensor node with a radio antenna, battery pack, and spike
required to fix the node in the ground. The node case houses
two printed circuit boards. The first one carries the sensing
module with the FPGA and NVRAM, and the second one the
radio networking module with the IRIS mote radio and the
microcontroller.
The vibration sensing processing unit has been mapped into
a gate-level design that can be programmed into a IGLOO
AGL 1000 FPGA. The design, which also encompasses FPGA
interface functions, occupies 98% of the available core cells,

The vibration-monitoring application accesses and controls

the WVSN via the MQTT-S messaging middleware as illustrated in Fig. 4. This open, topic-based publish/subscribe messaging protocol is very attractive for the application envisioned
because of its ease of integration into the enterprise network
and its implementation availability [3].
MQTT-S consists of two components: a client, which
provides publish/subscribe services to the application, and a
broker, which coordinates subscriptions and distributes publications to interested clients. The MQTT-S protocol used
between the broker and its directly connected clients fully

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Fig. 7.

Distribution of core-cell usage for different functions in FPGA.

Fig. 8. Synchronization error relative to BS reference time as a function of

number of hops. The plot indicates the mean, 50th , and 90th percentile of
1000 measurements.

with 68% needed for the signal-processing units digital lowpass filter, integrator, and FFT processing as shown in Fig. 7.
As the NVRAM has a size of 8 Mb, it can store continuous
data packets for 6.6 h and exception data packets for 64 s.
The vibration-sensing application, the MQTT-S client, the
WVSN stack, and the operating system TinyOS v2.1 are
executed on the microcontroller, and require 6 kB of RAM
and 45 kB of flash memory. Note that all network nodes are
programmed with the same firmware and can detect their
network role based on the available hardware components.

VIII. F IELD T EST R ESULTS

The operation of the WVSN prototype and its performance
were verified at an industrial plant under real operating conditions. This section describes the field test results.
A. Network setup and configuration
Fig. 9 shows the map of the industrial plant where we implemented a WVSN to continuously monitor vibration events
under realistic conditions during several days. The network
comprised 9 sensor nodes, 29 relay nodes, and one BS. As
illustrated in Fig. 9, all nodes were placed at conveniently
accessible geographic locations at the plant, without any
intention of optimizing the WVSN performance. The distances
between neighbor nodes varied between 30 and 300 m.
After installing all nodes, the WVSN setup and configuration procedures were started from the BS. The discovery
procedure took roughly 30 to 40 s to find all nodes, whereas
the link-probing procedure estimated the quality of all radio
links in about 13 min. An additional minute was spent for
calculating the routing tree, the TDMA schedule, and for
configuring the nodes and network acccording to the parameter
values given in Table I. Finally, after 15 min in total, the
WVSN started operating in synchronized mode.
Fig. 9 also shows all radio links discovered between the
nodes in the WVSN, where the link-probing procedure decided
for the presence of a link if the number of successfully
received link probe messages was higher than 95%. In general,
the quality of the links was very good: Links could even be
established over a distance of 500 m although the transmit
power of the radio was limited to 2 mW. Fig. 10 shows the
calculated routing tree used for forwarding vibration data
from the sensor nodes to the BS. The routing tree used for
broadcasting synchronization beacons looks slightly different
because of link quality asymmetries.

B. Sensing module
The performance of the sensing module implementation was
evaluated in a certification test conducted at an independent
calibration service laboratory. The module and a reference
system were mounted onto a shaking table and excited along
the x-, y-, and z-axes by sinusoidal vibrations with frequencies
from 1 to 100 Hz and velocity amplitudes from 5 to 50 mm/s,
respectively. In addition, the table was excited by chirp modulated sinewaves with a frequency sweep from 1 to 10 Hz in
10 s and velocity amplitudes between 1 and 60 mm/s. The test
results confirm that the sensing module fullfills the DIN 4150-3
requirements for frequencies between 1 and 40 Hz and does
not introduce nonlinear signal distortions.
C. Time synchronization
The performance of the synchronization procedure was
evaluated in our laboratory by measuring synchronization
errors in a prototype WVSN consisting of a chain of six relay
nodes. The errors were determined by measuring the time
offsets between the start of the superframe as monitored on the
micrcontrollers of the network nodes and the BS. Fig. 8 gives
the mean and jitter of the synchronization error between the
global reference time provided by the BS and the local time
of the network nodes at several hop distances. The mean and
the variance of the error increase with the hop distance, but
remain within acceptable bounds. It can also be seen that the
fluctations of the errors remain smaller than 1.5 ms as long as
the nodes are fewer than 6 hops away from the BS. Moreover,
the results indicate that the duration of the TDMA slots can be
reduced to 20 ms without significantly degrading the network
performance.

B. Packet transfer in synchronized mode

After setting-up and configuring the WVSN, the network
was operated in synchronized mode for several days to continuously monitor vibrations caused by regular work activities
at the plant and to detect potentially harmful vibration events
that we artifically generated. During these tests, the sensor

43

100
99.9

Latency [ms]

99.8
99.7

99.6
99.5

99.4
6

Fig. 11. Latency and base station packet delivery ratio for different hop
distances. Note that the axis for PDR starts at 99.4 %
Fig. 9. Placement of nodes in the field tests. Squares represent sensor nodes,
circles are relay nodes. Only links are shown that have been established with
a success rate of > 95%.

to the BS by two orders of magnitude.

C. Packet transfer performance
To evaluate the performance of the network, all nodes
collected statistical information on the number of packets
created, received, sent, and their corresponding timestamps in
each superframe. The parameter values collected were then
sent in a time slot of a collection frame to the BS. Based on
this information, the BS continuously monitored the state of
the network and determined various performance metrics.
Fig. 11 shows the measured end-to-end packet delivery
ratios (PDR) as a function of the hop distances between the
nodes and the BS. This metric is given by the number of
packets sent by the node and sucessfully received by the BS
divided by the total number of messages sent. The obtained
PDR values decrease slightly with increasing distance, but
they always remain higher than 99%. Fig. 11 also includes
the measured packet latency values as a function of the hop
distances. This metric indicates the time needed to propagate a
packet from a node to the BS. As the obtained latency values
were smaller than 2.5 s, all packets reached the BS within the
duration of a superframe.
The excellent performance results confirm our assumption
that the quality of the radio links is quite stable over time in the
deployment scenario considered and can reliably be obtained
by executing a link-probing procedure before initially configuring the network. Short-term link quality changes, which
may occur in a different wireless communication environment,
are better accommodated by temporarily buffering the packets
instead of reconfiguring the WVSN.

TABLE I
VALUES CHOSEN FOR VARIOUS NETWORKING PARAMETERS
Parameters
Number of sensor nodes
Number of relay nodes
Distances between nodes
Transmit power
Number of hops
Number of acknowledgments
Number of link probe messages
Superframe duration
Slot duration
Number of slots for Synchronization frame
Number of slots for Collection frame
Number of slots for Listening frame
Number of slots for Exception frame

Values
9
29
30 - 300 m
2 mW
4-6
3
100
10 s
20 ms
16 - 20
80 - 115
2
40

nodes successfully transmitted about 1 million continuous data

packets via the WVSN to the BS. Moreover, the nodes detected
more than 1008 exception events and uploaded 387 exception
data packets to the BS for signal inspection.
As a continuous data packet consists of 12 B, a total amount
of 12.2 MB of data was transmitted to the BS for continuously
monitoring vibrations during the field tests. If we had transferred the complete sampled acceleration waveforms, 1.5 GB
of data would have had to be forwarded. This clearly indicates
that the local pre-processing of the vibration samples in the
sensor nodes reduced the amount of data to be communicated

Fig. 10.

D. Network lifetime
To determine the lifetime of the network, the power consumption of the sensor and relay nodes was computed based
on the TDMA schedule monitored in the field tests. According
to this schedule, both types of nodes are alternatingly operated
in the awake and sleep state, in which they consume power as
listed in Table II. Their average power consumption is thus a
function of their duty cycle, which is defined as the fraction
of time of the superframe during which a node is not in sleep
state divided by the duration of the superframe and which can
be calculated from the scheduling information.
Fig. 12 shows the calculated histograms of the duty cycle
of the nodes obtained for two operational scenarios and

Routes from nodes to BS derived from topology shown in Fig. 9.

44

TABLE II
C URRENT DRAWN BY THE NETWORK NODES IN DIFFERENT STATES AT
3.6 V SUPPLY VOLTAGE
State
sleep
awake

sensor node
[mA]
10.31
28.66

relay node
[mA]
0.012
19.52

the expected battery lifetime of a node as function of the

duty cycle. The histogram with dark bars corresponds to
the scenario in which only vibration data are generated and
forwarded in the network, whereas in the other one in addition
statistical network information is forwarded by the nodes for
performance measurement purposes. In both cases, the duty
cycle of most of the nodes is smaller than 2%, corresponding
to an expected lifetime of more than 10 months if only relay
nodes are considered with a battery capacity of 3 Ah.
In the field tests, the sensor nodes comprised a sensing
module, a radio network module, and a battery with a capacity
of 19 Ah. The node can run for about 27 days if the radio
network module is operated with a duty cycle of 100%. If the
module is continuously sleeping, a maximum lifetime of 76
days can be reached. As the sensing module is never put to
sleep, the duty cycle does not have as large an impact on the
lifetime of the sensor nodes as it has on relay nodes.

Fig. 12.

Duty cycle distribution of network nodes and node lifetime

in terms of packet delivery ratio and latency: The high endto-end PDR of above 99% and the low latency of less than
2.5 s indicate that data packets can be transferred with a high
reliability to the destination and that near real-time monitoring
of vibration events on a remote server is possible.
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E. Resilience to network changes

To gain better insight into the resilience of the WVSN to
topology and traffic changes, the network was modified by
removing links between nodes to reduce the traffic through
certain nodes, and to create different routing trees and TDMA
schedules. Depending on the modifications, the maximum
number of hops in the test networks varied between 4 and
6, and the number of slots needed for the synchronization
and collection frames ranged from 16 to 20 and 80 to 115,
respectively.
IX. C ONCLUDING R EMARKS
We have presented a novel power-efficient wireless sensor
network solution for continuously monitoring seismic vibrations with accelerometers, pre-processing the sensed waveforms according to DIN 4150-3, and forwarding the retrieved
information with low-cost relay nodes to a vibration monitoring application executed in an enterprise network. The nodes in
the WVSN communicate with each other by executing a novel
networking protocol stack, whereas the sensor nodes exchange
application information with the backend by applying the
advanced publish/subscribe messaging protocol MQTT-S.
To obtain a network lifetime of several months, a centrally
configured TDMA-based network architecture with sleepmode support and pre-processing of the vibration data on the
sensor nodes were applied. The latter lowered the bandwidth
required for transmitting the information over the WVSN by
two orders of magnitude, even in the presence of frequent
exception vibration events. The operation of the WVSN was
evaluated in field tests under real operating conditions. The
results show that the network offers excellent performance

45