Abstract
This paper considers newly emerging wireless technologies that can be explored for potential exploitation in the future wireless sensor network solutions for water quality monitoring applications. The reviewed technologies promise to address long-standing issues that confront existing wireless sensor network solutions devoted to the monitoring of water quality parameters. Such issues include energy efficiency and long-range water quality data communication. These issues can be attributed to the shortcomings of legacy communication networks commonly combined with wireless sensor network solutions, due to a discrepancy caused by traditionally powering the sensors nodes using batteries. In particular, some of the legacy communication networks suffer from short communication range, while others are limited by high power consumption. These shortcomings provide scope for the utilization of newly emerging solutions identified in this study to advance the field of a wireless sensor network for water quality monitoring. To achieve this, three key categories of communication networks have been recommended in this paper, including their architectural design and network deployment for water quality monitoring applications. Also, this paper provides future directions on the identified communication networks to enhance their performance for the next-generation of wireless sensor network solutions for water quality monitoring applications.
Highlights
The journey of wireless sensor network (WSN) technology was initiated by the United States military around the 1950s, and has evolved rapidly, with remarkable impact [1]
This paper has presented a survey on the legacy and new communication technologies that are suitable for WSN solutions in water quality monitoring (WQM) applications
This is necessary to address the shortcomings of the existing WSN solutions for WQM applications due to the inefficiency - such as short communication range and high power consumption - of the legacy communication networks often combined with the WSN systems in WQM applications
Summary
The journey of wireless sensor network (WSN) technology was initiated by the United States military around the 1950s, and has evolved rapidly, with remarkable impact [1]. To achieve the dream of realizing low-power and long range communication capabilities in modern WSN systems for monitoring water quality applications, new energy efficient communication technologies that target devices with low energy requirements are emerging, which promise to advance the field of WQM. Examples of such communication technology solutions include Sigfox [45], LoRa [46], INGENU [47] and NB-IoT [48]. The new technologies are promising solutions to deal with the short range limitation of ZigBee and IEEE 802.15.4 networks
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