A distributed pavement monitoring system based on Internet of Things

Pavement is an important part of transportation infrastructure. In order to maintain pavement before the damage and improve the service quality, it is necessary to develop an intelligent and durable pavement information monitoring system. However, the pavement dynamic response monitoring is highly costly, easily obsolete and statistically redundant. The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology promises to change that. In this paper, an architecture of a distributed road IoT monitoring system is proposed, which has an acquisition layer, a preprocessing layer, a processing layer, an interaction layer, an energy layer and a network layer. Then, a prototype wireless pavement vibration monitoring system based on the IoT is developed, which consists of a number of wireless sensing nodes, a gateway, a remote server and a browser. Finally, data preprocessing, wireless communication, time synchronization, data processing and visualization, which represent the key to an effective system, are tested and discussed. The prototype wireless pavement vibration monitoring system provides a viable scheme for upgrading the IoT system and its application in the road infrastructures. In the future, any smart road will have an IoT wireless monitoring system to monitor the traffic, environment, and pavement information, which help enable traffic guidance, signal control, danger warning, scientific maintenance decision-making.