Design and Implementation of a Wireless Sensor Network for Water Resource Management

Water resource management is a crucial aspect to achieve efficient usage of resources and sustainable development. This paper presents research activities within the More4Water project, which aims to address the issues faced in the water resource management field by developing dedicated sensor networks and investigating novel modeling approaches. In particular, this paper focuses on the description of the early stages of development related to the design of a wireless sensor network for monitoring water resources, water supply networks, and irrigation systems. One of the main elements of the employed system development methodology is the development of prototypes and testbeds. These allow for validating the requirements and mitigating the risk of incorrect requirement definition. The architecture of the main testbed is presented, together with experimental results obtained from a dedicated prototype. This prototype is used to confirm the feasibility of integrating Long Range (LoRa) low-power radio communication technology into the wireless sensor network architecture, thus leveraging the Internet-of-Things paradigm for the water resource management application and validating the methodology employed for system design.