HydraSense: A Real-Time IoT Based Water Monitoring System Using LoRa Wireless Technology

Abstract

Water is essential for survival of human beings, industrial activity, the production of food and energy and basically the entire global economy. Water scarcity which can be caused by natural catastrophes, theft pollution, or poor water management, can have grave consequences, especially for countries like Pakistan whose economy relies heavily on agriculture. According to UNO, Pakistan is the 4th highest user of water and the 7th most water-scarce country in the world. According to a research conducted by Pakistan Council of Research on Water Resources (PCRWR), if adequate steps are not taken to counter water-shortage, there will near absolute scarcity by 2025. In such a situation, Internet of Things (IoT) can play a very important role in order to manage the water resources in a better way. HydraSense is an IoT-based solution for water management system that can be deployed to help the administrations by giving them insights into the water usage, aids them to detect water-thefts and identify points of leakages. HydraSense uses a low-power, long-rage LoRaTM wireless technology to gather data from water distribution equipment. The solution consists of three major components. The sensor-nodes such as flow-meters, motor-pump sets and water-level sensors will sense the data and transmit it to a LoRa gateway. The gateway is responsible to aggregate the data from all the end-nodes and sends it to a Control PC. The Control PC has a dashboard installed on it by which the user can monitor the data and remotely control the state of motor-pumps.