A Novel Design of IEEE 802.15.4 and Solar Based Autonomous Water Quality Monitoring Prototype using ECHERP

Abstract 

The recent advancement in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology has brought new distributed sensing applications such as water quality monitoring. With sensing capabilities and using parameters like pH, conductivity and temperature, the quality of water can be known. This paper proposes a novel design based on IEEE 802.15.4 (Zig-Bee protocol) and solar energy called Autonomous Water Quality Monitoring Prototype (AWQMP). The prototype is designed to use ECHERP routing protocol and Adruino Mega 2560, an open-source electronic prototyping platform for data acquisition. AWQMP is expected to give real time data acquirement and to reduce the cost of manual water quality monitoring due to its autonomous characteristic. Moreover, the proposed prototype will help to study the behavior of aquatic animals in deployed water bodies.