CoCoMo: Toward controllable and reliable corrosion monitoring with a wireless sensor network

Corrosion monitoring is highly needed in concrete-steel civil engineering applications. By the corrosion information captured from structures, field experts can deduce where the corrosion events occur and how they will possibly evolve. However, traditional approaches are either based on high-cost manual operations or unable to support user's control once the data collection starts. This article presents a corrosion-monitoring framework, called CoCoMo, based on embedded sensing and wireless networking technologies, aimed at achieving long-term and controllable corrosion monitoring. CoCoMo involves corrosion-detecting devices, well-designed wireless networking protocols, and the visual user interface which not only displays collected corrosion data but also serves as command-issuing agent. We finally build a small-scale test-bed to evaluate the feasibility and the transmission reliability of CoCoMo.