Smart water grids for smart cities: A sustainable prototype demonstrator

In the framework of a smart city, information and communications technologies are applied to tackle urban living challenges, with the aim of improving the citizens' quality of life, through a more efficient use of limited resources. Urban sensing by wireless sensor networks allows the collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination of valuable information, that is used to design adequate policies matching the users' needs, and avoiding non-ecological wasting of resources. To face an increasing water demand, and ensure a safe access to clean water resources, a network of sensor nodes could be located along water pipes. The automatic monitoring of the water grid, and the smart metering of water consumptions could be enabled, to increase the users' awareness, and improve the efficiency of the infrastructure management. To this aim, the paper presents a prototype demonstrator of a smart water metering infrastructure, developed in cooperation with Telecom Italia Lab, and built upon self-powered nodes in a Wireless Metering Bus capillary network at 169 MHz. The main elements of the system are presented, and the attainable performance discussed, through a number of experimental results.