Design of IPv6 Network enabled Smart Water Flow Meter System for India

Abstract

Water is one of the major requirements for human survival. During the past decade, water needs have risen exponentially to an unprecedented scale in India. The rapid urban development, increasing human population, climate change and wasteful usage have led to severe water shortages. The solution lies largely in areas of effective mechanisms for conservation, distribution, efficient use and management of this resource. Ensuring access to safe and clean water is another issue that requires attention. In this paper, we present an IPv6 network connected design for real-time water flow metering and quality monitoring system. Our prototype implementation uses the emerging HTTP-compatible CoAP based monitoring and control approach for seamless web integration, thus supporting internet based data collection. The system addresses new challenges in the water sector - ease of billing, fair billing and the need for a study of supply versus consumption of water in order to create awareness to curb water wastage and encourage its conservation. The traditional water metering systems require periodic manual intervention for both metering and maintenance making it inconvenient and often least effective. Shortcomings of the existing models call for a ubiquitous usage of wireless systems for smart water flow metering and quality monitoring. We propose to do this with the aid of CC2538 motes that monitor the water consumption and communicate the data to a gateway wirelessly so that the data can