RF performance evaluation of the nRF24L01+ based wireless water quality monitoring sensor node: Khartoum city propagation scenario

Abstract

Recently, and to cater to increased needs of Drinking Water Quality Monitoring (DWQM) and data management, there has been a growing interest in the marketplace as well as in the research community to develop advanced water quality monitoring systems utilizing modern information and communications technologies (ICT) such as wireless sensor networks (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT). The application of the wireless-sensing paradigm is becoming a common trend in water quality monitoring systems. In fact, a growing body of the literature has focused on developing wireless sensing-enabled water quality monitoring systems. However, previous studies have not dealt with the radio performance evaluation of modern wireless water quality monitoring systems deployed in urban city scenarios. The present paper seeks to address the radio frequency (RF) performance evaluation for a developed modern wireless Drinking Water Quality Monitoring System (DWQMS) based on the commercial nRF24L01+ RF module. This research study is based on three city propagation scenarios as case studies. The obtained experimental data suggested that the nRF24L01+ module can provide relatively acceptable RF performance under less favorable and hostile city propagation environments.