Wireless Underground Communications in Sewer and Stormwater Overflow Monitoring: Radio Waves through Soil and Asphalt Medium

Abstract

Storm drains and sanitary sewers are prone to backups and overflows due to extra amount wastewater entering the pipes. To prevent that, it is imperative to efficiently monitor the urban underground infrastructure. The combination of sensors system and wireless underground communication system can be used to realize urban underground IoT applications, e.g., storm water and wastewater overflow monitoring systems. The aim of this article is to establish a feasibility of the use of wireless underground communications techniques, and wave propagation through the subsurface soil and asphalt layers, in an underground pavement system for storm water and sewer overflow monitoring application. In this paper, the path loss analysis of wireless underground communications in urban underground IoT for wastewater monitoring has been presented. The dielectric properties of asphalt, sub-grade aggregates, and soil are considered in the path loss analysis for the path loss prediction in an underground sewer overflow and wastewater monitoring system design. It has been shown that underground transmitter was able to communicate through thick asphalt (10 cm) and soil layers (20 cm) for a long range of up to 4 km.Information 2020, 11, 98 2 of 11 towards building a sustainable urban underground infrastructure. To that end, the works in [45,46] list physical characteristics that need to be considered while planning urban underground infrastructure, the authors of [47] list changes required to improve current urban underground infrastructure, and the authors of [48] use ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology for detecting damage in underground pipes. Finally, the authors of [49] provide a detailed survey that studies various urban indicator (systems) and argues the inclusion of urban underground space into the list of indicators.Wastewater facilities make up an important part of an urban infrastructure. City governments establish facilities for collection and treatment of the wastewater. These facilities process millions of gallons of wastewater on a daily basis. The main purpose of these facilities is to look after the quality and quantity of wastewater being collected at the collection system and reaching recovering facilities. It is important because, if not monitored properly, thousands of gallons of water flowing underground can result in overflow of sanitary sewers. Therefore, a smart solution is required for timely detection and prevention of any disaster occurring due to inefficient monitoring of wastewater. However, city governments do not have affordable underground communication and sensor technologies. Moreover, there exist limited cost-efficient underground IoT solutions because of connectivity challenges in UG environment. Another issue is the extensive cabling required to connect with existing over-the-air communication solutions [50,51]. To that end, the contribution of this paper is to improve the connectivity and communication in an underground environment, which is achieved by performing the path loss analysis for ur...

A Survey on Subsurface Signal Propagation

“…Underground lateral wave communication is empirically evaluated through following UG2AG experiment setup: burial depth is 40 cm, above-ground antenna and soil surface were separated by the distance of 55 cm, transmit power level is maintained at +30 dBm, and 144 MHz frequency is used. The study [57] was successful to achieve long communication range of 50 m [71].…”

“…The communications between the buried underground antenna without considering the impact of orientation and impedance of antenna is studied in [122]. Another work [71,123] conduct the performance analysis of four antenna buried in refractory concrete. In this work, the transmitter is buried at 1m depth and author does not consider the concrete-air interface.…”

“…information of the well. Although MPT technology is quite mature, however, some of the impairments impairments in MPT systems are discussed briefly [71,89]. •…”

“…Moreover, time-critical applications require efficient decision making procedure because it is possible that decision making opportunity is gone by the time data reaches the cloud. Hence, fog computing should be integrated with WUC systems [71].…”

Soil Medium Electromagnetic Scattering Model for the Study of Wireless Underground Sensor Networks

“…Typically, a two-stage model is proposed based on the field characteristics of the antenna and considers four sources of path loss. The two-stage model has a different coefficient, which depends on the soil types in the near-field and far-field regions [4,5].…”