Energy-aware routing for wireless sensor networks for structural health monitoring

Applications are invited for a self-funded 3-year full-time or 6-year part-time PhD project, to commence in October or February.

The PhD project will be based in the School of Computing and will be supervised by Dr Ioannis Kagalidis, Dr Nikos Nanos and Dr Branislav Vuksanovic.

Structural Health inevitably degrades over the long service period of contemporary structures, but socio-economic reasons drive the constant need to use and retain existing buildings, well beyond their original design lifespan.

Small-scale seismic events (microtremors) have been shown to negatively affect the residual capacity of structures without immediate and obvious manifestations of damage, which has led to catastrophic failures during strong motion events that appear well within the design specifications at the time of design (SoCal 1994, Kobbe 1995, Athens 1996, Kashmir 2005, Abbruzzi 2009, Amatricce 2016, Mexico City 2017, etc).

Because structural health monitoring is traditionally an extremely resource-intensive procedure reserved for high importance structures, it also fails to capture the vulnerability potential on a city scale, and significantly increases the post-earthquake cost and rehabilitation expenditure needed.

This project concerns Low-Cost, Near Real-Time Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems based on wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Routing is of paramount importance in WSNs as it critically contributes not only in the delivery of data from the sensor, but also directly to the network lifetime and energy consumption of the sensor network. Two specific research areas have been identified as requiring urgent investigation:

• Geometric-aware routing, where location awareness in all the sensor nodes that are deployed at a specific location will also provide a secondary structural topology representation
• Routing based on energy awareness: maximizing the network lifetime in WSNs is of paramount importance as energy requirements and regular recharging of the sensor nodes may not be possible due to the expense or placement of the individual nodes. Network long life expectancy is also a factor.

Fees and funding

Visit the research subject area page for fees and funding information for this project.

Funding availability: Self-funded PhD students only. 

PhD full-time and part-time courses are eligible for the UK Government Doctoral Loan (UK and EU students only).

Bench fees

Some PhD projects may include additional fees – known as bench fees – for equipment and other consumables, and these will be added to your standard tuition fee. Speak to the supervisory team during your interview about any additional fees you may have to pay. Please note, bench fees are not eligible for discounts and are non-refundable.

How to apply

Please contact Dr Ioannis Kagalidis (Ioannis.Kagalidis@port.ac.uk) to discuss your interest before you apply, quoting the project code.

Please note, to be considered for this self-funded PhD opportunity you must quote project code CCTS4960219 when applying.