IoT based solid waste management system: A conceptual approach with an architectural solution as a smart city application

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is constantly evolving and is giving unique solutions to the everyday problems faced by man. “Smart City” is one such implementation aimed at improving the lifestyle of human beings. One of the major hurdles in most cities is its solid waste management, and effective management of the solid waste produced becomes an integral part of a smart city. This paper aims at providing an IoT based architectural solution to tackle the problems faced by the present solid waste management system. By providing a complete IoT based system, the process of tracking, collecting, and managing the solid waste can be easily automated and monitored efficiently. By taking the example of the solid waste management crisis of Bengaluru city, India, we have come up with the overall system architecture and protocol stack to give a IoT based solution to improve the reliability and efficiency of the system. By making use of sensors, we collect data from the garbage bins and send them to a gateway using LoRa technology. The data from various garbage bins are collected by the gateway and sent to the cloud over the Internet using the MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport) protocol. The main advantage of the proposed system is the use of LoRa technology for data communication which enables long distance data transmission along with low power consumption as compared to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or Zigbee.