Wireless Technologies and Network Planning for Water Quality Monitoring: the AQUASENSE Approach

The Aquasense project is a multi-site Innovative Training Network (ITN) in water and food quality monitoring using autonomous sensors and intelligent data gathering and analysis. This paper aims to study the most suitable communication system model regarding radio signal coverage and networking performance in this frame. This objective is achieved by evaluating the expected performance of three long-range communications technologies, 4G/LTE, NB-IoT, and LoRa, to support a wireless sensor network reporting data from the sensing devices to a remote central station where they are collected and analyzed. In order for the performance to be assessed, the WinProp software suite is adopted to reproduce the communications scenarios and estimate the network throughput. The results clearly show that LTE outperforms the other two technologies as it achieves the highest throughput but is limited in terms of coverage. On the other hand, the LoRa and NB-IoT technologies achieve outstanding connectivity for large areas far away from the base stations, making the NB-IoT the solution offering the most valuable trade-of between connectivity and throughput.