Wireless sensor network for real-time flood monitoring based on 6loWPAN communication standard

Abstract

Riverine flood is a major disaster faced by most countries and has significant adverse effect on long term economic growth of affected regions and their environments. Several systems have previously employed different technologies to monitor riverine flood but are expensive with low accuracy and consumes high amount of energy. In this paper, we proposed an energy efficient and accurate flood monitoring system. The system leverages on Internet Protocol Version 6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6loWPAN) technology to construct a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) comprising of two XM1000 motes and a rule-base water level monitoring application. The motes were configured using NesC programming for flood monitoring with Basestation and water level sensing applications. The water level sensing mote samples and transmits real-time water level information to the Basestation mote which interfaces with a rule-based water level monitoring application. The application compares current water level with a predetermined threat level and alerts relevant agencies when flood is imminent via an email. The results obtained from the emulation of the developed system showed that, it achieved an accuracy of 95.3% in water level monitoring with a Mean Squared Error of 5.1. The power consumed in transmitting a packet of 2 bytes payload plus other overhead was 0.4µJ and 0.0396mJ with and without 6loWPAN configuration respectively.