A Review of the Topologies Used in Smart Water Meter Networks: A Wireless Sensor Network Application

Abstract

This paper presents several proposed and existing smart utility meter systems as well as their communication networks to identify the challenges of creating scalable smart water meter networks. Network simulations are performed on 3 network topologies (star, tree, and mesh) to determine their suitability for smart water meter networks. The simulations found that once a number of nodes threshold is exceeded the network’s delay increases dramatically regardless of implemented topology. This threshold is at a relatively low number of nodes (50) and the use of network topologies such as tree or mesh helps alleviate this problem and results in lower network delays. Further simulations found that the successful transmission of application layer packets in a 70-end node tree network can be improved by 212% when end nodes only transmit data to their nearest router node. The relationship between packet success rate and different packet sizes was also investigated and reducing the packet size with a factor of 16 resulted in either 156% or 300% increases in the amount of successfully received packets depending on the network setup.

Smart water consumption measurement system for houses using IoT and cloud computing

“…Technological solutions based on IoT require wireless communication technologies, through which the devices can receive and send data effectively (Marais et al 2016 ), so their review is necessary. In a research article by Joo et al ( 2015 ), several intercom tests between IoT devices were performed, where it was determined that using UHF and the internet (TCP/IP) the signal is more stable compared with UHF, DCU, and Wibro, in addition, their results show that the average reception of the packages was 94.1%.…”

“…of a river’s flow over a large area, in a study conducted by Chung and Yoo ( 2015 ), it is proposed to use a low-cost wireless sensor network (WSN) whose results show that data loss is below 1% and network traffic is reduced to 1/5. In addition, Marais et al ( 2016 ) proposed to use ZigBee technology with mesh topology to build an extensive network of intercommunicated devices that allow maximum effectiveness when receiving and sending data and, based on their simulations, data loss resulted less than 0.14%. A water monitoring system is built by Chen and Han ( 2018 ) in a city based on the “Bristol Is Open” platform; likewise, Wi-Fi is used due to its long range (up to 100m) and a transmission packaged of up to 7Gbps.…”

Low-Power Low-Cost Wireless Flood Sensor for Smart Home Systems

“…Wireless communication technologies have advanced rapidly and the use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has extended to a large number of applications, such as home automation, environmental monitoring, health monitoring, etc. due to their very promising advantages [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ]. WSN eliminates the need of wired sensor nodes across the home and reduces installation and maintenance costs.…”

Do prepaid water meters improve the quality of water service delivery? The case of Nakuru, Kenya

“…Water metering is a management tool in water supply. It is used by the service providers to quantify water bills, for leak detection, monitoring water demand and plan for supply, among others (Maddaus 2001). Many water metering technologies and models have been reported in literature.…”

“…These meters also have some impact on the type of water meter management in terms of meter reading and water billing. As such, there are now meters that allow automatic reading and telemetric submissions to a central location and those that require a meter reader to periodically walk to the meter and collect the readings (Marais et al 2016). There also those that are pre-loaded to allow water-use up to the loaded limit (Gambe 2015).…”