Enabling Communication Networks for Water Quality Monitoring Applications: A Survey

This paper considers newly emerging wireless technologies that can be explored for potential exploitation in the future wireless sensor network solutions for water quality monitoring applications. The reviewed technologies promise to address long-standing issues that confront existing wireless sensor network solutions devoted to the monitoring of water quality parameters. Such issues include energy efficiency and long-range water quality data communication. These issues can be attributed to the shortcomings of legacy communication networks commonly combined with wireless sensor network solutions, due to a discrepancy caused by traditionally powering the sensors nodes using batteries. In particular, some of the legacy communication networks suffer from short communication range, while others are limited by high power consumption. These shortcomings provide scope for the utilization of newly emerging solutions identified in this study to advance the field of a wireless sensor network for water quality monitoring. To achieve this, three key categories of communication networks have been recommended in this paper, including their architectural design and network deployment for water quality monitoring applications. Also, this paper provides future directions on the identified communication networks to enhance their performance for the next-generation of wireless sensor network solutions for water quality monitoring applications.