Wireless Airborne IoT Network for Rural Water Quality Monitoring

Currently, the Chini Lake shores house around 500 indigenous people distributed across six villages with limited access to cellular tower communication coverage. This is mainly due to the challenging terrain profile and dense foliage. Therefore, it is important to establish a reliable line-of-sight (LoS) data transmission via a low-altitude platform (LAP). The high availability but low-cost wireless communication infrastructure such as LoRa is the perfect solution in this scenario. This will allow better coverage due to good propagation characteristics at lower frequency bands as well as the elevated platform. The solution shall also equip a wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) network, sensors technologies and a big data analytic enablement platform. In addition, the characterization of the wireless channel behaviour in Malaysia's tropical rural areas, where the propagated wireless signal suffers from several imperfections, such as attenuation, diffraction, scattering and absorption due to the presence of various surrounding elements is also being investigated. The outcome of this research is expected to offer a new understanding of the propagation behaviour of current and future wireless IoT technologies, thus helping the network engineer to perform accurate planning and deployment in a rural environment. With this solution, the indigenous Orang Asli community in Chini Lake, Pahang, Malaysia will have access to digital content, as well as water level alerts for mitigation of flooding and drought situations, and Internet access for the promotion of local products and services.