About

Concept

Rivers reflect the health of the surrounding land as they are a collection point of waters flowing from all around. Quality monitoring for surface waters including rivers currently involves methods which are characterized as:

Predominantly manual based on sampling and subsequent analyses in water laboratory.
Mostly sparse in time and rare in space.

We propose a shift in water monitoring approach from traditional and very limited (in terms of time and space) field measurements to novel Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) systems which are gaining the momentum not just among researchers, but also in the market. These recent advanced technologies compared with the present water quality methods would readily provide us with advantages such as smaller, cost effective, and low power consumption sensors. They would in turn enable convenient monitoring arrangements, like continuous, real-time, and broad in coverage measurements, remote monitoring, identification of long-term trends and fluctuations of parameters of interest, etc. Further, such systems may be of particular importance, say, in identifying sources of pollution.

Objectives

The InWaterSense overall objective is to apply recent advanced practices stemming from ICT in water quality monitoring for healthy environment, and strengthen Kosovo's capacity in research in national priority sectors of environment and ICT.

The specific objectives of the project to serve the overall objectives mentioned above are following:

Specific objective 1: Build a WSN infrastructure in the river Sitnica for monitoring water quality with the aim of providing a best practice scenario for expanding it to other surface water resources as well in the country. read more

Review the state of the art in:
1. WQM practices and data to date in Kosovo.
2. Research to date in WQM based in WSN.
3. Research to date in deploying pervasive mobile sensing, future Internet technologies, and intelligent systems for WQM.
Specify requirements, and design the deployment of a WSN in the river Sitnica.
Implement the WSN in the river Sitnica.

Specific objective 2: Monitor water quality in the river Sitnica supported by the WSN in order to make the quality data available to the community and the decision makers for determining the current health of the river. read more

Measure the pollution parameters at real time to support long term continuous monitoring of water quality.
Identify areas where water quality degradation exists.
Provide a comparative ranking of identified areas of water quality degradation taken different ranking criteria.
Investigate sources of water quality degradation.
Publish quality data collected for river Sitnica through a Web portal inclusive Webcam streaming and browsing for mobile users.

Specific objective 3: Transform the existing WSN for WQM into an intelligent platform to operate almost autonomously, and support more functionality as envisioned by the future Internet and intelligent systems. The intelligent behavior of the system is aimed to present a novelty in research in the field. read more

Consider sensing of water quality parameters through pervasive mobile devices.
Consider augmenting the RFID tags to every single node (sensors, stations, and remote center) of the WSN for unique identification, and then connecting nodes to provide services as foreseen by the future Internet of Things (IOT), like is aggregation of monitoring data along the path of a WSN, from sensors, to database stations, to finally reach the remote center for processing.
Build an intelligent component which is capable of automating the work usually performed by water experts, and beyond, and let the WSN system itself monitor pollution parameters, identify pollution areas, investigate pollution sources, and rank pollution areas automatically.