A Reliable and Efficient Wireless Sensor Network System for Water Quality Monitoring

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are strongly useful to monitor physical and environmental conditions to provide realtime information for improving environment quality. However, deploying a WSN in a physical environment faces several critical challenges such as high energy consumption, and data loss.In this work, we have proposed a reliable and efficient environmental monitoring system in ponds using wireless sensor network and cellular communication technologies. We have designed a hardware and software ecosystem that can limit the data loss yet save the energy consumption of nodes. A lightweight protocol acknowledges data transmission among the nodes. Data are transmitted to the cloud using a cellular protocol to reduce power consumption. Information in the cloud is mining so that realtime warning notifications can be sent to users. If the values are reaching the threshold, the server will send an alarm signal to the pond’s owner phone, enable him to take corrective actions in a timely manner. Besides, the client application system also provides the feature to help the user to manage the trend of a physical environment such as shrimp ponds by viewing charts of the collected data by hours, days, months. We have deployed our system using IEEE 802.15.4 Standard, ZigBEE, KIT CC2530 of Texas Instrument, and tested our system with temperature and pH level sensors. Our experimental results demonstrated that the proposed system have a low rate of data loss and long energy life with low cost while it can provide real-time data for water quality monitoring.