Structural Health Monitoring of bridges has aroused the interest of many researchers on various
disciplines. Our purpose in this paper is to make an overview on SHM of bridges from two different research
areas: Civil and Communication Engineering. For the former part, we provide some insights into the objectives
and the ways SHM of bridges is made. For the Communication Engineering side, we provide some
background on the used technologies in SHM of bridges. We distinguish the wired and Wireless Sensor Networks
(WSNs). We focus on communication limitations in WSNs, mainly the interference problem occurring
when the sensors broadcast their measurements and resulting in performance degradation. In this paper we review
basic tools existing in literature based on the Physical Layer Network Coding approaches. We focus on
the Compute-and-Forward protocol known to provide significant gains. Our main contribution concerns the
implementation of this protocol and discussion of its practical challenges.