Wireless sensor networks: A survey on monitoring water quality

Diseases related to poor water and sanitation conditions have over 200 million cases reported annually, causing 5-10 million deaths world-wide. Water quality monitoring has thus become essential to the supply of clean and safe water. Conventional monitoring processes involve manual collection of samples from various points in the distribution network, followed by laboratory testing and analysis. This process has proved to be ineffective since it is laborious, time consuming and lacks real-time results to promote proactive response to water contamination. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have since been considered a promising alternative to complement conventional monitoring processes. These networks are relatively affordable and allow measurements to be taken remotely, in real-time and with minimal human intervention. This work surveys the application of WSN in environmental monitoring, with particular emphasis on water quality. Various WSN based water quality monitoring methods suggested by other authors are studied and analyzed, taking into account their coverage, energy and security concerns. The work also compares and evaluates sensor node architectures proposed the various authors in terms of monitored parameters, microcontroller/microprocessor units (MCU) and wireless communication standards adopted, localization, data security implementation, power supply architectures, autonomy and potential application scenarios.