An IoT-based measurement system for aerial vehicles

In this paper we present an innovative monitoring system, namely TLSensing, that can be integrated in future aerial vehicles for supporting the development of advanced health management systems. Based on the revolutionary Internet of Things paradigm and emerging open standards for low-power and short-range wireless technologies, it intends to enable pervasive monitoring services through the diffusion of a large number of sensors around the aircraft, which continuously capture critical and non critical parameters from on-board equipments and the environment and deliver them to the remote monitoring devices through wireless communication links. In summary, TLSensing is composed by a number of constrained devices equipped with sensing and wireless communication capabilities, a central system coordinator that controls data acquisition processes through a dedicated monitoring software, and a web server application that collects data coming from the network and makes them available to the user and to external software entities belonging to the health management system. Starting from the description of the technological background that motivated the development of the presented platform, we will carefully describe both hardware and software components integrated in TLSensing, alongside their interaction and the most important features they cover. Moreover, to provide a further insight, we will also present how TLSensing works by showing some measurements collected with an experimental testbed deployed in our research laboratory.