Manual of Commercial Methods in Clinical Microbiology

Abstract

—Water Grids represent a challenge for the scientific community operating in the Sensor Networks (SN) field. Indeed, an increasing water demand and a certain difficulty to access clean water resources can be registered nowadays in several countries, and adequate saving policies have to be applied in order to match the user needs and avoid non-ecological wasting. From this point of view though, the most recent SN technologies can provide viable solutions to perform automatic monitoring to the Water Grid and smart metering of water consumption to support the Public Utilities not only in guaranteeing a transparent service to the citizens but also in optimizing the available resources for a wider sustainable distribution. In this paper, the authors want to focus on the possibility to involve self-powered nodes in Wireless SNs with the aim of maximizing their autonomy, typically bounded by battery lifetime, and thus facilitating their application to a pervasive monitoring scenario, such as that of Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) for water. An overview of the most promising technologies and some preliminary evaluations related to them are thus given. Finally, a realistic case study for the specific smart water metering problem is also discussed and analyzed, by taking the economic feasibility issue into account.