An IoT based 6LoWPAN enabled experiment for water management

Abstract

During the past decade, water needs have risen exponentially to an unprecedented scale in India. The demand for water supply is ever increasing and satisfying this requirement has been a major challenge for many countries around the world. Urbanization, climatic changes and wasteful usage has further depleted the resource. Water being one of the major requirements for human survival, conservation and management of the resource must be given utmost importance. Ensuring access to safe and clean water is another issue that requires attention. In this paper, we present an IPv6 network connected IoT design for real-time water flow metering and quality monitoring. Our prototype implementation uses CoAP for monitoring and control approach which supports 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. Automatic detection of leakage through any of the outlets is notified to the user. We also measure the quality of water distributed to every household by deploying pH and ORP sensors. 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 programmed using ContikiOS to monitor the water consumption and communicate the data to a gateway wirelessly.