Towards Monitoring the Water Quality Using Hierarchal Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Water is a limited resource and essential for agriculture, industry and creatures existence on earth including human beings. Water quality monitoring is essential to control physical, chemical and biological characteristics of water. In addition, water quality monitoring can help with water pollution detection and discharge of toxic chemicals and contamination in water. A large number of inexpensive sensor nodes using hierarchical communication structure can be deployed to cover a large monitoring area with enough density. The paper provides a hierarchical routing protocol to reduce the communication overhead and increase the life time of wireless sensor network (WSN) suitable for river/lake water quality monitoring. The proposed routing protocol is compared with its predecessor LEACH. Experiments conducted using our custom simulator shows that the proposed routing protocol, power by genetic algorithm, create an energy balance in the network, save the node energy and thus increase the lifetime of the network by 25% in comparison to LEACH.