A WUSN-based Smart System for Water Flow Control

Water is one of the highly valuable resources and protecting it from wastage and contamination is a must. Water leakage due to pipes' damage may result in a considerable financial loss and huge water waste. This is furtherly accentuated in countries like United Arab Emirates, where the water supply relies heavily on sea water desalination and where the very high temperature (may exceed 40°C) adds an extra parameter causing pipes damage and cracking. Manual monitoring and checkup of the pipe-grid may be tedious, time consuming, of limited coverage, and may not detect all the issues in a timely efficient manner. Wireless underground sensor networks (WUSN) present a compelling alternative, especially with the advent in WSN and WUSN technologies and the variety of events that can be detected. In this paper, we propose a WUSN-based architecture for the autonomous detection and reporting of water leakage and contamination, along with the exact location of the incident. The architecture also provides means to take necessary `first-aid' actions to limit the damage (e.g. close the water valve right before the incident location). A prototype was implemented and tested, and the results were very promising.