Experimental Investigation of “Smart Dust” for Pavement Condition Monitoring

1 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 to apply a “Smart Dust ” sensor network for monitoring pavement temperature and moisture presence to detect icy road condition. Careful considerations yielded effective solutions to various hardware and software development issues including the selec-tion of sensors and antenna, design of casing, interfacing motes with alien sensors and programming of motes. A series of experiments was carried out to study how traffic interference affected packet delivery performance of a small-scale sensor network in a pseudo-field environment. The results are analyzed and challenges are identified in this smart sensing application. The research activities will benefit robust real-world implementations of off-the-shelf sensor network products.