A wireless sensor network solution for monitoring water quality in Botswana

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) provide reliable and affordable infrastructure for various applications ranging from environmental monitoring, industrial automation, telemedicine, to military surveillance. These networks allow monitoring processes to be conducted remotely, in real-time and with minimal human intervention. Water quality monitoring is essential to the provision of clean and safe water. In Botswana, Water Utilities Corporation (WUC), has adopted a conventional like process that employs several independent hand held meters for sampling different water quality parameters manually. However, this process has proved to be ineffective since it is expensive, time consuming, requires considerable human resource capacity and lacks real-time results to promote proactive response to water contamination. In this work, an integrated WSN based solution that employs Libelium's Waspmote platform has been developed. The sensor node is based on ATMEL's ATmega 1281 8-bit low power microcontroller which can operate for more than a year without recharging its battery. Results have shown that the proposed system managed to sample associated water quality parameters in real time with the same accuracy as currently adopted methods. In addition, the system is autonomous, easy to install, highly scalable and has a relatively high sampling rate which improves the temporal resolution of the monitoring process.