REAL-TIME MONITORING OF WATER QUALITY IN LAKE NAKURU USING WIRELESS SENSOR TECHNOLOGY

Abstract

Water quality monitoring in a water body is necessary to determine the major pollutants and their temporal variations. This in essence leads to informed decision-making on the appropriate mitigation measures and to determine the effectiveness of the existing water quality control measures. In this paper, a Low power communication technology for wide area networks (LORAWAN) is applied to connect sensor nodes to collect real-time data on Lake Nakuru waters. The system consists of sensors, a wireless sensor node, a communication network, and data visualization and cloud storage. The various sensors connected to the sensor node sense environmental parameters such as temperature, electric conductivity, pH, and dissolved oxygen. The wireless sensor node is deployed in a floating buoy on the lake and is powered by a solar panel. It sends the data to the gateway over the long range at a very low data rate with low power consumption. The cloud server applications such as Things network together with Thingsspeak are employed to receive, present, and store measured data. The implementation of the wireless sensor technology has enabled long-term data collection at scales and resolutions that are difficult to obtain manually. In addition, the sensor’s real-time connection with its immediate physical environment provides localized and updated measurements that are hard to obtain through traditional methods of data collection. And finally, this wireless sensing system can be used for many other IoT applications.