Integration of the Blockchain with Structural Health Monitoring to Securely Transfer Buildings Health Data

The strength of the civil structures is always deteriorated because of environmental impacts, continuous loading, surrounding vehicle movements, etc. Therefore, the role of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) comes into play. SHM is the process that is continuously used to monitor the strength of the structure. In vibration-based SHM, sensors are usually deployed on the structure to record the dynamic response of the structure. To do so, experts need to be present on site to deploy the sensors, form sensor networks, configure a data acquisition system, etc. They need to do this task periodically, which is quite expensive, time-consuming, unreliable, and requires manpower. Moreover, many times a wired data acquisition system is used; consequently, more power and huge installation space are needed. What if all the sensor's data is available at a remote place continuously and securely? It will facilitate experts to conduct an analysis from anywhere and at any time. In Structural Health Monitoring research, data sharing is a vital step to monitoring the structure from remote places. Current data sharing techniques rely on third-party platforms, which is why the transparency, security, trust, and immutability of such platforms are always questioned. To address these issues, this work proposes a unique framework in which a blockchain is integrated with SHM to securely transfer SHM data to remote places. This work will examine the possibilities of integration in two ways: In the first way, the sensor data is directly sent to the remote place using blockchain; in this case, there is no need to save the data on the site, as the data comes from the sensor and will be fed directly to the blockchain network. It might require data to be buffered at the site, depending on the transaction speed facilitated by the blockchain. In the second way, all the sensors' data needs to be accumulated at the coordinator node first; thereafter, the whole data will be transferred using blockchain at once. Although whole data transfers at once might be very expensive and unreliable, that is why the functionality of the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) can be exploited in this case.