Smart water grid management using LPWAN IoT technology

Abstract

As the world population increases at a steady rate, providing clean water to the masses in an efficient manner is one of the biggest challenges faced in the modern era. Controlling the flow of water so that it doesn't go to waste is another challenge. Water flow is generally managed through locks and manually controlling these gates often turn out to be a long-winding process. Due to recent technological progress and increased connectivity in rural areas, a system of IoT devices proved to be alternative for managing the water grid. A new Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology called LoRa is explored in our study for the communication of these IoT devices. The LoRa devices can communicate within a range of 2–4 KMs while running on batteries that last for years. As a pilot project, we implemented a smart water grid management system in Mori, a village in the eastern Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh situated near to Bay of Bengal. The water grid management system proposed in this paper involves different sensors deployed at various strategically chosen locations to measure the quality of water by generating real time data. The system also provides an alert mechanism which notifies the different level of authorities through email and SMS in case of any issues. Furthermore, it provides a solution for handling the locks that have been employed in and around the village to control the flow of water in a timely manner. The sensors attached with a micro controller in the LoRa module will communicate to the cloud environment through the LoRa gateway. A web page provides the interface to the residents and to the authorities to gauge the water quality after analyzing the data using the prediction algorithm.