New communicating concrete for data storage and retrieval through integrated micro sensor nodes.

Summary A new area is coming with intelligent materials able to provide diverse functionalities to users all along the product lifecycle, during the design, manufacturing, use and dismantling phases. These materials can track their own evolution all along the product lifetime, gather helpful information and thus allow information continuum at all time and everywhere. Usually, these functionalities are fulfilled via the integration of specific electronic components into the material (wireless sensors nodes, RFID tags). The present paper forms part of this framework in considering that thousands of micro-sensor nodes are integrated into a concrete precast. All nodes store different information of precast properties in their memory requiring designing a specific Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) protocol to extract this information. The proposed protocol employs three mechanisms. First, the random walk is used as multi-hop process to forward the request to further nodes. Then, the pull gossip mechanism is added to interrogate the neighbor nodes in each hop. Finally, a mechanism called farthest neighbors selection is added. Only the farthest and most powerful neighbor is selected as next hop for improving the reliability of the original random walk process.