An Energy-Efficient LoRa IoT System for Water Monitoring: Lessons Learned and Use Cases

With the growing impact of urbanization, indus-trialization, and climate change, monitoring water bodies like lakes, rivers, and reservoirs has become essential for detecting pollutants, managing resources, and preventing environmental hazards. Water monitoring is a critical process that involves continuously assessing water characteristics to ensure the safety and sustainability of water resources. We can develop detection and prediction systems by analyzing the collected data from water bodies over time. However, developing and deploying a reliable water monitoring framework must be investigated and researched. Therefore, this paper presents a water monitoring framework to address the power consumption challenge, which is one of the most important aspects of a remote monitoring system. We designed and implemented a real-time remote water monitoring framework to achieve cost and battery efficiency. We deployed our prototype in a real-world situation and discussed our challenges and limitations. Our system contains three main parts: first, an end device, which is in charge of collecting information from water and transferring the data to the land; second, a gateway placed on shore to connect the end devices to a centralized cloud server; and Finally, a cloud platform for gathering, storing and analyzing the sensor's information. Also, we provided a comprehensive study on power consumption and different end device architectures to reduce power consumption. Finally, we described different use cases of a water monitoring system using low-cost sensors.