LoRa-based Network for Water Quality Monitoring in Coastal Areas

Agriculture Farming activity near to rivers and coastal areas sometimes imply spills of chemical and fertilizers products in aquifers and rivers. These spill highly affect the water quality in rivers’ mouths and beaches close to those rivers. The presence of these elements can worse the quality for its normal use, even for its enjoying. When this polluted water reaches the sea can also have problematic consequences for fauna and flora. For this reason, it is important to rapidly detect where these spills are taking place and where the water does not have the minimum of quality to be used. In this article we propose the design and implementation of a LoRa (Long Range) based wireless sensor network for monitoring the quality of water in coastal areas, rivers and ditches with the aim to generate an observatory of water quality of the monitored areas. This network is composed by several wireless sensor nodes endowed with several sensors to physically measure parameters of water quality, such as turbidity, temperature, etc., and weather conditions such as temperature and relative humidity. The data collected by the sensors is sent to a gateway that forwards them to our storage database. The database is used to create an observatory that will permit the monitoring of the environment where the network is deployed. We test different devices to select the one that presents the best performance. Finally, the final solution is tested in a real environment for checking its correct operation. Two different tests will be carried out. The first test checks the correct operation of sensors and the network architecture while the second test show us the devices performance in terms of coverage.