Flomosys: A Flood Monitoring System

Abstract

The expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to numerous innovations in the industry, including improvements to existing systems. Disaster prevention and monitoring systems are a prime example of such systems. Every year, there are significant and preventable financial losses, not to mention the safety hazards caused by floods. To warn people ahead of time, we can deploy low-power wireless sensor nodes to send readings across any terrain to a cloud platform, which can perform pattern analysis, prediction, and alert forwarding to anyone’s cellular device. In this paper, we propose Flomosys, a low-cost, low-power, secure, scalable, reliable, and extensible IoT system for monitoring creek and river water levels. Although there are multiple competing solutions to help mitigate this problem, Flomosys fills a niche not covered by existing solutions. Flomosys can be built inexpensively with off-the-shelf components and scales across vast territories at a low cost per sensor node. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of this system as well as real-world test results.