Sensor Networks for Monitoring Water Supply and Sewer Systems: Lessons from Boston

In recent years, research in wireless sensor networks (WSN) has been undergoing a quiet revolution, promising to have significant impact on a broad range of applications relating to environmental monitoring, structural health monitoring, security and water safety. The convergence of the Internet, telecommunications, and novel information technologies with techniques for miniaturisation now provides vast opportunities for the development and application of low-cost monitoring solutions which could drastically increase the spatial and temporal resolution of environmental data. The paper describes the development of a prototype monitoring system which bridges advances in wireless sensor networks with advances in hydraulic and water quality modeling. The prototype monitoring system was deployed at Boston Water and Sewer Commission (BWSC) in December 2004, and it has been successfully collecting and charting near-real time hydraulic and water quality data as well as data from combined sewer outflows (CSO). The remote monitoring system has unique functionalities in terms of sampling rates (up to 1000 S/s), time synchronization (up to 1 ms) and in-network processing. These features create novel opportunities for wirelessly collecting data for applications such as hydraulic pressure transients, remote acoustic leak detection together with low-duty cycle applications such as monitoring water quality parameters and water levels in CSOs. The trial with BWSC has been tremendously useful to prototype hardware and software tools, and to identify deployment and operational challenges in using sensor networks for monitoring and management of large scale water supply systems. This paper was presented at the 8th Annual Water Distribution Systems Analysis Symposium which was held with the generous support of Awwa Research Foundation (AwwaRF).