A WSN-Based Solution for Pollution Detection and Localization in Waterways

To deal with the devastating impact of water pollution, the quality of water distributed within waterways needs to be monitored through a periodic collection and analysis of a set of water quality measurements. Existing water monitoring systems, which are proposed in the literature, exhibit a set of drawbacks including the expensive cost and complexity of deployment, the inaccurate localization of water contamination zones, and the absence of techniques allowing the auto-diagnosis of failures in the monitoring system. We propose in this paper a novel monitoring waterways’ pollution system that combines the use of mobile wireless sensor networks and radio frequency identification (RFID) systems. Thanks to the deployment of a set of fixed RFID tags on the waterways banks, the proposed system allows mobile sensors to accurately locate the positions of the contaminated water zones. It also allows storing pollution, monitoring, and sensor management-related data in the deployed tags. The proposed wireless sensor network implements an energy saving algorithm allowing to reduce the energy consumed by mobile nodes, and to minimize the number of sensors required to monitor a waterway. With respect to WSN-based water monitoring platforms existing in the literature, the proposed system offers a set of enhancements, in terms of design cost, energy consumption, scalability, data accuracy, and tolerance to errors and data loss.