Water quality monitoring with internet of things (IoT)

The paper suggests an Internet of Things (IoT) based system implementation by embedding the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) platform and Internet Protocol (IP) based communication into a single platform for water quality monitoring (WQM) purpose. The suggested radio frequency for the proposed WSN communication to be deployed in vegetation area is 920MHz. The measured water parameter in this proposed system is pH level by using an analog pH sensor. The ambient temperature is captured during pH measurement by using an analog temperature sensor. All the WSN nodes are deployed in a real environment at the lake in the campus area of Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) for performance evaluation. Instead of using 2.4GHz ZigBee protocol, the 920MHz Digi Mesh protocol is proposed to be implemented for water quality monitoring in vegetation area due to its ability to surpass the signal attenuation. This novel proposed system prototype was evaluated in a real environment to ensure that the main functionality on pH measuring process is following the design requirements. Several experimental analysis were conducted including the energy analysis and communication read range analysis to study the overall performance of the proposed system.