Data Transmission Unit and Web server Interaction to Monitor Water Distribution: A Cyber-Physical System Perspective

Abstract

Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is the concept of converging physical devices with cyber systems, CPS shares environmental information globally and improves resource utilization. The major aim of our work is to use the CPS technology to overcome improper handling and care of water supply infrastructure. Our experimental water pipileing infrastructure test bed set up at National Institute of Technology Karnataka Surathkal (NITK), India includes analysis of water distribution in three storage tanks using minimal wireless communication technology. This requires monitoring and wireless networking of the monitored data. In order to obtain water usage of each storage tanks, we have proposed low cost customization of water pipeline infrastructure. Monitoring unit (MU) includes 865-867Mhz RF module. In this paper, we deal with the networking part of CPS to perform water monitoring distribution in each storage tanks. Networking of CPS includes communication between Data transfer unit (DTU) and Aggregator unit (AU) used in the MU and also communication between DTU and web server unit (WS). Communication between DTU and AU involves analyzing the amount of water flow in the Inlet and Outlet of storage tanks in the campus. The WS unit contains resultant data of water usage in each storage tanks. The extensive group of resultant data sets of water usage, obtained in each storage tanks, gives importance to data analytics. Initially, we came up with a small-scale experimental set up at NITK campus; which is then extended to large scale area. The waterflow rate graphs show average daily and monthly usage of water of each storage tank.