2010 International Conference on Innovative Computing and Communication and 2010 Asia-Pacific Conference on Information Technology and Ocean

Engineering

A Remote Wireless Sensor Networks for Water Quality Monitoring

Ji Wang 1 Xiao-li Ren1*
Information School, Information School,
Guangdong Ocean University, Guangdong Ocean University
Zhanjiang , China Zhanjiang , China
e-mail: zjouwangji@163.com e-mail: rxl.2005@163.com
Yu-li Shen2 Shuang-yin Liu 1
Computer Science and Engineering School, Information School,
ZhongKai University of Agriculture and Technology, Guangdong Ocean University,
Guangzhou, China Zhanjiang , China
e-mail: 2100a@21cn.com e-mail: xlqwyf@sina.com

Abstract —To resolve real-time the traditional water A typical wireless sensor network consists of a
quality detection method, a novel system of remote water gateway nodes and several nodes distributed or
quality measuring and monitoring based on wireless positioned in the environment of interest[3]. Each node
sensor network (WSN) and Code Division Multiple is expected to detect events of interest and estimate
Access (CDMA) technology is proposed. The WSNs can parameters that characterize these events. The resulting
monitor the targets and water quality information of the information at a node needs to be transmitted to the
waters through the cooperation of a large amount of gateway nodes either directly, or in a “multi-hop”
sensors. The optimization of node distribution is studied fashion involving automatic routing through several
with the intention of reducing the energy consumption other nodes in the network. Implementation of such a
and ensuring the effective information acquisition in network requires hardware components, and
wireless sensor network. The functions of remote corresponding software modules to program these
detection and real-time monitoring of natural water are components in a cooperative manner.
implemented through the CDMA wireless data The WSN, which faces a watery environment, is
transmission. This system has a simple architecture, and composed of wireless sensor nodes, communication
isn’t confined by the geographical position. The
nodes(cluster head), gateway node ,and a remote center
experimental results show that this system can run stably,
computer system. This WSN is shown in Fig.1. Sensor
and its operation is convenient.
Keywords : Water quality parameters(WQP), wireless
nodes have been distributed with the purpose of
sensor networks, remote monitoring and measuring, Code detecting waters, implementing data collection,simple
Division Multiple Access processing, and communication with gateway node
(cluster head), and so on. The collected data is
transmitted to gateway nodes through communication
I. INTRODUCTION nodes gradually, then it is connected to the Internet
It is important to set up advanced real-time online through (Code Division Multiple Access), CDMA
monitoring systems for water source development and networks, at last transmitted to the control center. At the
utilization. Usually water pollution monitoring needs a same time the system could achieve full-duplex
sample from the targeted area, then that sample is communication between administrator and WSNs.
analyzed in the lab, which is high cost and low
efficiency. Water samples change and if pollution is not
detected in a timely fashion, the transmission may
affect the analyzed results. Therefore, we developed a
real-time online remote water quality monitoring
system based on the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs)
[1]. WSNs have been growing rapidly in the past few
years. Lots of research has been done on WSN
communications,power conservation, routing
algorithms,etc.However,most research mainly focuses
on terrestrial sensor networks.Research on sensor
networks facing territorial waters is limited[2].It’s very
important to conduct research on sensor networks
facing territorial waters because they can benefit many
areas of science and industry ,such as water quality
monitoring ,ocean graphic data collection,disaster
Fig.1. System structure scheme
detection and prevention ,oilfield monitoring ,etc.

978-0-7695-3942-3/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE 7

DOI 10.1109/CICC-ITOE.2010.9
 II. METHODS
AˊHardware Design of Sensor Nodes
A commercial hardware platform that we have been
investigating consists of processor communication
radio boards ommonly referred to as “motes”[4,5].
Each mote includes a battery-powered device, a sensor
unit, a power unit, a two-way ISM band radio
transceiver unit (includes an RF antenna), an ADC unit,
a processor that runs TinyOS-based code, and logger
memory capable of storing a high number of
measurements. Cluster nodes communicate with their
cluster head directly, and there is no sensor unit. Two
types of motes in this commercial system,which can be
found in Figure 2.
Fig.2. Wireless sensor node structure
1˅ Microprocessor˖Given the present monitoring
situation, AT91R40008 (Atmel company) is used as the
microprocessor. The microcontroller is a member of the
Atmel AT91 16/32-bit microcontroller family, which is
based on the ARM7TDMI processor core. This
processor has a high-performance, such as 32-bit RISC
architecture with a high-density, 16-bit instruction
set ,and has very low power consumption. Furthermore,
it features 256K bytes of on-chip SRAM, and a large
number of internally banked registers, resulting in very
fast exception handling, and making the device ideal for
real-time control applications. It is mainly in charge of
sensor management, data processing, and data transfer
in the work state.
2 ˅ radio-frequency module ˖ The Micro-power
wireless data transceiver module selected was the
CC1020 (Chipcon company). CC1020 is a true single-
chip UHF transceiver designed for very lowpower
consumption and very low voltage(+3.0~5.0V) wireless
applications. The circuit is mainly intended for the ISM
(Industrial, Scientific and Medical) and SRD (Short
Range Device) frequency bands at 402, 424, 426, 429,
433, 447, 449, 469, 868 and 915 MHz, but can easily be
programmed for multi-channel operation at other
frequencies in the 402 - 470 and 804 - 940 MHz range.
The CC1020 is especially suited for narrow-band
systems with channel spacings of 12.5 or 25
8
kHz ,omplying with ARIB STDT-67 and EN 300
220.Its main operating parameters can be programmed
via a serial bus, thus making CC1020 a very flexible
and easy to use transceiver.
3 ˅ Sensor Unit ˖The sensor unit includes water
quality parameter sensors,and signal amplifier circuit.
How to choose sensors is one of the key technologies in
the monitoring system. Currently the water quality
monitoring sensors are mainly fiber sensors, biological
sensors, original film microelectrode. Thick-film
microelectrodes are mainly used for the detection of
ammonia, chlorine , dissolved oxygen,and heavy metals
(Cu, Pb, Cd, Hg, Ag, etc.). The system sensors seleck
OrbiSint W CPS 11 of pH value (own temperature
sensor Pt100), OxyMax W COX 41 of dissolved
oxygen, ConduMax W CLS12 of conductivity sensor,
and other water quality indicator sensors.A simple
sensor circuit can be directly connected to the port of
MCU. It is inconvenient to put the highly accurate or
bulky sensors with the other sensor nodes, This
grouping of sensors can be donethrough a standard
interface part of the RS232 to connect.
TLC2252 operational amplifiers are the core
structures in the signals amplification circuit of water
quality parameters. Various water quality parameters
sensors output weak voltage signal of millivolt
level,through water quality parameters signal
amplification circuit into a multi-channel 0 to 3.3V
voltage signal, and sent to the microprocessor module
A/D converter to complete the water quality parameters
collection. R4 adjustments can be adapted to different
parametersƍ accuracy.The special sensor interface
circuit is shown in figure 3:
Fig.3.Block diagram of sensors interface
4 ˅ Gateway Node Design˖A sink consists of a
mote attached to a mote-interface-board that is
interfaced to a CDMA via the parallel port. The
gateway is composed of the data terminal equipment
(DTE) and CDMA data transmission equipment (DCE).
DTE and DCE communicate through RS232. DCEs
connected CDMA networks to send and receive data
transparently in order to achieve communication
between DTE connected to the internet and monitoring
center. As shown in figure 4, it uses the same central
processing unit AT91R4008 to manage sensor nodes
and RF transceiver module to receive or sent the data .
CDMA module is mainly composed of a module built
by the Simcom company, in order to transmit
monitoring data to the monitoring host computer.
Fig.4. Structure of sink
Underwater sensor networks have recently attracted
an increasing interest from the researchers who mainly
focused on terrestrial sensor networks before numerous
underwater sensor networks are deployed for water
quality monitoring [6]. A novelty of our design is a
wireless sensor network for water quality monitoring
which arms to develop a wireless sensor network
featuring “plug and play” sensor platforms, novel
sensors and low power consumption communications.
The zigbee communication standard is used in the
sensor network to meet the low power consumption
requirements. A customized sensor board with mult
“plug and play” sensor interfaces for a multi-agent task
is developed in our project to sense
temperature,pH,DO,heavy metal ,et.al. All sensor nodes
are put into an IP-68 waterproof case. In the waters
quality system, a buoy is used as the water quality
monitoring nods. On the buoy, multiple 100 watt solar
panels, eight 100Ah 12V batteries, water quality
sensors, and an intelligent controller for sensing the
data collection and distribution are installed. The buoy
nodes transmits real-time data to the remote center by
using a cellular Code Division Multiple Access
(CDMA) Internet Protocol modem.
5˅Main Control Center˖ The remote monitoring
center consists of the CDMA gateway and the data
center.In addition,the remote monitioring center also
includes the database and monitioring software .Usually
the monitoring center sets up a master server with fixed
IP address, installing Windows Server 2003 operating
system, using a scripting language of ASP compiling to
read the sensor location information and ID number.
install SQL Server 2003 database management software
to analyze and process proscenium data and provide
storage service. The center structure as shown in Fig.5:
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Fig.5. Structure of remote monitoring center
B System Software Design
1 ˅ Software structure of sensor networks: A
waters network can not simply set its sampler nodes to
sleep for a day between water quality parameter
readings, and then awake to check environmental
conditions. This is because nodes must be ready to
respond as soon as an event of interest occurs. Which
in our case, a water quality pollution event.
Furthermore, when a sampling node awakes, all the
router and gatherer nodes that it relies on to deliver its
message to the node,must also awake. Clock drift
between nodes makes the coordination of waking
cycles a difficult task.
The data transmission uses the master-secondary
station mode. the gateway node ,as the master station
controls the time order of communication in the
network, and the other nodes (collection nodes,
communication nodes) as the secondary station which
has a fixed address, So can be addressed by the master
station.The collection nodes mainly responsible for the
monitoring data, and transmission of variety of sensor
original data to communication nodes; The
communication nodes carry out simple computations
and transmit only the required and partially processed
data to gateway node group in the interruption path.The
sensor node software design is divided into gateway
node software and secondary-node software.
Given the driver's needs, the gateway node uses the
open source operating system-TinyOS; an open source
embedded operating system, mainly used in the field of
wireless sensor networks.TinyOS(Tiny Micro-threading
Operating System) is developed by UC Berkeley. The
architecture component -based operating system makes
it possible to update quickly, which in turn reduces
code length limited by the network memorizer. TinyOS
components include network protocol, distributed
server, sensor drive,and data-identified tool. Good
power management is a result of the event-driven
implementation model, and the model also allows for
flexibility in scheduling. TinyOS, and the NesC
programming language, use a modular,interface driven
syntax, but there is still a high degree of interaction
between components. To program the nodes so that
different nodes can use different configurations of the
same code-base requires effective high-level
abstractions of basic behaviour. In each TinyOS-NesC
package, the available activities (commands and events)
of the package are exposed by the interface of a single
component. This component is responsible for
accessing all other sub-components, and translating
between context-sensitive and context-free formats. For
example, the Sensing package uses general-purpose
interfaces to access the sensor board’s Analog-Digital-
Converter (ADC), but provides commands to retrieve
context-sensitive pollution samples and health samples
giving current battery voltage. This component is also
responsible for all configuration and initialisation of the
package. For example, the Logging package requires
memory to be allocated before writing, and the
Communication package requires configuration of radio
parameters[7].
It was found that this approach worked well in
finetuning specific behaviour for different, specialised
nodes,while retaining communication consistency
between them.This approach also supports the
development of the network as a series of logical steps,
where adding new features or new specialisations
requirs little effort. For example, adding code to
increase sampling during pollution involves utilising
the Rate Handler to notify the Timer, building data
aggregation requires a few lines of application code
between the receiving and forwarding of samples.
Working with the NesC paradigm assisted us in
producing this structure. Defining application specific
interfaces makes different node specialisations concise
and easy to produce. However, the underlying
implementations still use the generalized interfaces, and
are thus compatible with existing TinyOS components.
Also, since NesC uses an interface implementation
wiring mechanism, it would be easy to substitute new
radio or sensing modules, without affecting our overall
design.WSN software architecture is shown in Figure 6:
Fig. 6 Flow chart of WSN software structure
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2˅Software Structure of Monitoring Center System˖
Software development uses Development Kit of
mobile network manufacturers.The remote monitoring
database center is the centrums of monitoring center,
whose function is to complete management, storage,
analysis, computing, printing of the signal sent from
remote gateways, and remotely monitoring the
terminal node status.
First of all, the system should build a data source,
list the data of the database, and records the data sent
by Sink points, including the SIM (ID) number, data,
real time, and so on. Then, it records sink point
attributes, which include name, attribute, the work
state check codes, location, etc. Lastly, it defines the
system administrator, including the logo, password, etc.
SQL defined the received data stream format to the ID
7E 08 YY MM DD HH MM X1X2 X3 P1 P2 OD. ID
is the number of the sensor, 7E08 is identifier of data,
YY MM HH MM is the time of year, month, day,
hour ,and minute, X1X2X3 is the value of the
concentration data, and P1 P2 OD is the check code [8].
The human-machine interface of the data center
selected In Touch, providing powerful function
support, such as information seeking and testing,
dynamic graphic, recording, system alarm, dynamic
data supporting exchange, etc.
C The System´s Communication Protocols
1 )Wireless Sensor Network Protocol ˖ The sensor
nodes (collection node, communication node) use the
Zigbee protocol[9] (shown in Figure7). IEEE802.15.4
specification is short-range wireless technology that
works in the range of 2.4GHz, and is the protocol basis
of the application layer and network layer of Zigbee.
Based on this standard, a number of sensor nodes
transmit data from one sensor node to another to
achieve the higher efficiency of energy-saving
communication. The system based on the routing
protocol of receiving the node location in the actual
data process, and such protocol ,directly determines the
next jump node according to the neighbor node ID No.
of the pre-existing collection.
Fig.7. ZigBee agreement string topology
 Gateway communication with a sensor node uses To our knowledge, there have been no other protocols
the same protocol, and communication with the of experimental demonstrations of a network protocol
monitoring center uses the TCP / IP protocol, using that avoids congestion collapse for CDMA systems.
CDMA network access control center. In this paper we propose and demonstrate a
SMAC[10] is a MAC protocol designed to address transmission scheduling algorithm. We use an CDMA
the problem of energy efficient, coordinated sleeping, network supporting 3 (mult) users. Each user utilizes a
and making it well suited for our application. Nodes code-set of 16 chip-times, 8 wavelength, and code-
synchronise with their neighbors for a cycle of weight 6. We demonstrate the transmission scheduling
by delaying each user’s traffic to have the least
sleeping and waking. In the lowest duty cycle of 2-3%,
interference with the line traffic and show the increase
nodes sleep for approximately 12 seconds, and then
in system performance by orders of magnitude. To
awake for the coordinated transmission and reception establish a comparison with Aloha-CDMA, we transmit
of messages by reliable unicast ,or by broadcast. The the data with random delays and take an average over
SMAC software stack also provides a reliable physical various line state. Results from the measurements show
layer implementation with Manchester encoding.We that transmission scheduling can provide orders of
have implemented a reactive protocol for gathering magnitude improvement in bit error rate.
water quality data and advertising water quality
pollution events using event condition-action rules. III. EXPERIMENT
The nodes check for pollution each SMAC cycle (12 As of now,The blueprint was tested in the volcanic
seconds). If there are additional triggers during a lake of Huguangyan World Geopark,which is located
pollution period, then the timer is reset to 2 hours. In 18km in the south part of Zhanjiang in a long time
this way, sampler nodes will be gathering data at a monitoring regime. 11 monitoring nodes ,and 4
high frequency during pollution events, while clusters ,have been successfully designed along with a
interesting changes in pollution can be expected to sink node which displays the real-time date on the “3.5
occur. The gatherer node waits up to one minute to LCD”. The sensor network consists of one (or several)
aggregate pollution messages,and then forwards the super node and many small sensor nodes. The small
samples towards the sink. sensor nodes have a small solar panel and one or two
2 )CDMA network Protoco ˖ CDMA is a new sensors connected. The super-node has a more powerful
service of mobile data communication, providing a solar panel, and more sensors connected. The cluster
connection between user and data network, and high- head nodes send the gathered data to the super-node
speed wireless IP or X.25 services for the mobile users. (sink) step-by-step. All the small sensor nodes use the
It is used to transmit data in CDMA networks. Each low-power Zigbee radios, and the super-nodes use
user can occupy a number of wireless channels at the CDMA for transmitting data far away. The deployed
same time. The same wireless channel can be shared by WSN nodes transmit acpquired water quality
multiple users, having the advantages of "high speed" information including dissolved oxygen(DO) ,PH,
and "always-on". In this system, CDMA data transfer Conductivity. During the experiment,the data has been
operations need to realize the upper protocol, such as sampled once every other day,and the mean value is
PPP agreement on the user side, and the need for the calculated in the nodes gateway and the remote center
user using the TCP/UDP protocol to complete the data everyday as shows Tab.1 .
binding and down frames of CDMA operation. The TABLE I. COMPARING BETWEEN THE CONVENTIONAL
smallest CDMA data module is DTGS-800, which DETECTION DATA, AND THE SYSTEM MONITIORING DATA WHICH
inner sets up TCP/UDP protocol. So ,Microprocessor DISPLAY IN SINK AND THE REMOTE CENTER
directly sent AT instructions to the module to connect
WQP Do pH Conductivity
internet for data transmission long-distance. (mg·Lí1) (7.0~9.4) (μs/cm)
In our design an O-CDMA network protocol called No. 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3
interference avoidance (IA) has been adopted to help Oct.1 8.8 8.8 8.7 8.7 8.5 8.5 355 355 354
manage congestion, and maintains a relatively-high
throughput, even under extreme loads[11,12]. The Oct.2 8.8 8.8 8.8 8.7 8.5 8.4 355 354 354
proposed media access protocol is interference Oct.3 8.7 8.6 8.6 8.4 8.4 8.2 355 353 353
avoidance. The protocol consists of two different Oct.4 8.7 8.7 8.7 8.7 8.6 8.6 355 353 352
functionalities, state estimation and transmission
The first group of conventional detection data have
scheduling. State estimation is a mechanism by which
been obtained by artificially sampling On-site, and
nodes on the network estimate the state of the line.
using conventional methods. The second group of mean
Transmission scheduling is a mechanism by which
value is displayed in nodes gateway of our designing
nodes use the estimated state to schedule their
system. the third group average is displayed in the
transmissions to avoid packet losses due to interference.
remote center. The results( shown in Figure 8)

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demonstrate that there is very little Error between the exclusion zones; design of complex underwater
system monitoring data and conventional detection data. acoustic sensor networks which be applicable to deep
The system can replace conventional detection methods. waters(ocean and sea) , with varying degrees of
It was also evaluated that the system is capable of autonomy, decentralized control, and data-to-decision
working without exchange of the sensor for one year of integration.
continuous monitioring. After that time the sensors
should be regenerated in order to guarantee the system ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
steady. This work was financially supported by Guangdong
(Located in southern China) Nature Science
 Foundation(7010116) and Zhanjiang (Located in
westen Guangdong) Torch-plan Projects˄20090725˅.
 
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