River water quality monitoring using LoRa-based IoT

Abstract

Water pollution presents one of the biggest challenges in the world today, as the degradation of water quality of rivers in many instances is increasing so fast and poses a big danger to all forms of life, eventually causing many aquatic species and other species that depend on them to be endangered. Hence, with the development of Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), there arises a need to monitor river waters for a timely response in protecting the rivers, which is the aim of this paper. With respect to this project, we searched a little bit for some existing IoT technologies and other related work. In this paper, we propose a practical low-cost solution based on Long Range (LoRa) technology to obtain real-time observations of, with certain sensors, such water parameters as temperature, pH, conductivity and turbidity. Data gathered at a sensor node are transmitted via LoRa modulation to a gateway for processing and local storage on a Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) server, visualization on a Node-RED interface, or transmission to the cloud. The prototype system created is employed in the actual field and demonstrates that the water quality monitoring in the river can be carried out effectively within a small scale of the area of roughly 20 km2 depending on the location of the study site.