Trustworthy Cyber–Physical Edge-SHM Architecture for Operational Underground Tunnel Crack Monitoring Under Resource-Constrained Conditions

This study presents a low-cost edge-IoT-based structural health monitoring (SHM) architecture for crack monitoring in operational underground tunnels. The system integrates crack-displacement sensing, temperature measurement, ESP32-based edge processing, LoRa/MQTT communication, AES/ECDSA-based data protection, and cloud-based data management. The architecture was validated through a 30-day field campaign at two representative cracks in the Hai Van Tunnel, with measurements acquired at 60 s sampling intervals. The results show that edge-based wavelet–Kalman processing improved measurement stability and reduced high-frequency noise, while the implemented security mechanism introduced only minor latency relative to the monitoring cycle. The two monitored cracks exhibited small micrometer-scale fluctuations associated with temperature variation and showed no cumulative widening trend during the observation period. This study demonstrates the feasibility of campaign-based tunnel crack monitoring using a trustworthy edge-sensing architecture, while longer deployments with more sensing nodes are needed to fully evaluate scalability and operational durability.