Ultra-pervasive district monitoring for water leak detection

Abstract

Purpose: One of the main concerns regarding integrated water resources management is related to the development of scalable monitoring and control systems for pro-active maintenance of water distribution networks. It is necessary for the availability of ultra-pervasive sensor-actuator networks to be deployed at the district level. The same technology is useful for several other applications involving sensors accrued from city to building scale. This paper deals with the design, development, and initial experiments of a first prototype of ultra-pervasive monitoring network for automated leakage detection in water distributions system (WDS). These pose technology challenges mainly generated by the need to transmit from underground. Method: The availability of a new generation of ultra-pervasive communication and monitoring systems is a prerequisite for providing fine-grained, real-time monitoring data at district level, so that control policies can be applied in real-time. The sensing layer developed in the system object of this paper is intended for a dense deployment even underground. It is based on short-range battery-operated wireless networks, forming a mesh made up of end devices (sensors/actuators), routers/repeaters and coordinators/gateways. The coordinators/gateways-besides coordinating the network routing-transfer sensors packets to a host application enabling interconnection to fixed and mobile networks made available by the Telco operator. Because of this set-up the network can cover a large territory at low cost. It supports leakage detection algorithms, estimates leakage occurrence probability and pinpoints them. Results & Discussion: First laboratory trials and preliminary onsite experiments show the feasibility of the approach and the potential for ultrapervasive communication through the network. Results indicate this system to be cheap and easily deployable alongside WDS.