A Blockchain-based Secure Data Collection Mechanism for Smart Water Meters

Advances in technology have led to a growing interest in smart water meters, which make it easier and cheaper for water utilities to collect meter readings wirelessly from people’s premises. This concept increases data accuracy and leads to huge savings for utilities. The major drawback is, however, that meter readings can be tampered with, in transit from the customer premises to the water utility’s servers as well as at the utility’s premises. To address this problem, a distributed ledger of blockchain-based secure data collection mechanism has been developed for smart water meters. The chosen implementation toolkits of the blockchain consist of a Substrate blockchain framework, where a node was created with a customized pallet or module, FastAPI to connect and make functional calls to store and retrieve data from the blockchain node. The testing of the implemented system focused mainly on functional tests. When the data is being stored, hashing has been applied to secure the data which results in a blockchain hash that is used to query on-chain data as a form of collection from the blockchain node. This will help to ensure that the integrity of the water data is preserved. The findings are relevant to any country that wants to implement the blockchain concept in smart water meters.