A case study of Internet of Things: a wireless

household water consumption monitoring system

Shuang-Hua Yang , Xi Chen , Xiaomin Chen , Lili Yang , Baichong Chao , Jiangtao Cao
Department

of Computer Science, Loughborough University, LE11 3TU, UK

of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, LE11 3TU, UK
School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430079, China
School of Information and Control Engineering, Liaoning Shihua University, Fushun, China
School

AbstractIn this paper IoT application is illustrated through

a real implementation of global household water consumption
monitoring system across two countries in the Europe. A novel
wireless water consumption monitoring system is designed, in
which flow rate/temperature sensors are placed at different
detection spots in a house to collect data, and the collected
data is routed to a remote computer server via the home WiFi
and the Internet. The designed system was installed and tested
in 30 recruited households, 10 in Sosnowiec, Poland and 20 in
Skiathos, Greece. It has been demonstrated that the global system
is capable of providing remote, near real-time monitoring of
water consumption in different households. Lessons learned from
this real applicationy has been summarised to guide further work.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Water is one of the most important natural resources on the
earth to life, prosperity and wealth. As Marshall [1] remarked,
water has played a crucial role in the location, function and
growth of communities. However, the water crisis has been
announced by the World Economic Forum as the No. 1
global risk based on the impact to society (as a measure of
devastation) and the 8th based on the likelihood of occurring
within 10 years [2]. The World Health Organization has
reported that 750 million people around the world lack access
to safe water, which is approximately one-ninth of the worlds
population [5]. More disturbingly, these numbers will continue
to grow. Some part of western, modern world becomes not
much different from areas of third world affected by water
scarcity. The extreme weather and the global warming will
cause drinkable water less available in more areas, even now
the water scarcity has already affected 17% of EU territory. In
the light of these disturbing facts, any cause of water wastage
should be identified and removed if possible. Water usage at
a household level can be effectively reduced by increasing
consumers awareness and changing their inappropriate water
use behaviours in the daily routine, e.g. brushing teeth with
a running tap, using toilet as a dustbin, leaving a leaky
faucet unfixed and etc.. To cut off such wastage, a real-time
household water consumption monitoring system is required,
through which the detailed information of the amount and
the way water is used in a household can be collected, and
further analysed to identify wastage and find potential saving
opportunities.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a scenario in which objects,
animals or people with communication, sensory or action

978-1-5090-0366-2/15/$31.00 2015 IEEE

capability are uniquely addressed and inter-connected via

wired/wireless technologies to achieve desired goals. Since
the concept of IoT was introduced in 2005, the deployment
of it has been seen in a diversity of domains, such as smart
cities and homes [9], [10], smart grid [11], healthcare [12],
environment monitoring [14], emergencies [13], logistics [15],
industrial control [16], [17] and etc.. IoT has also been
applied for water resource management, e.g. monitoring of
tap water quality in cities, detection of leakages and wastes in
rivers and sea, monitoring of water level variations in rivers,
dams and reservoirs, detection of liquid presence outside
tanks and pressure variations along pipes. In this paper a
novel wireless monitoring system for water consumption at
a household level is designed using the concept of IoT, in
which sensors are installed at different detection points in a
house for data acquisition, and the acquired data is routed to a
remote computer server for analysis via the local WiFi and the
Internet. The designed system was installed and tested in up to
30 households, 10 in Sosnowiec, Poland and 20 in Skiathos,
Greece. It has been demonstrated that it is capable of providing
remote, near real-time monitoring of water consumption in
different households. It can be considered as the application
of IoT in the field of household water management.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows. Section II
briefly describes the features of the IoT. The design of the
IoT based water consumption monitoring system is given in
Section III. Afterwards the application results of the monitoring system are presented in Section IV. The lessons learned
and limitations identified from the case study are introduced
in Section V before concluding the paper in Section VI.
II. I NTERNET OF THINGS
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm in which
a variety of pervasively present things, such as devices,
sensors, actuators, mobile phones, are provided with unique
identifiers and the ability to interact with each other and
cooperate with neighboring smart components to reach a
common goal. A thing, in the Internet of Things, could be
a person with a heart monitor implant, a farm animal with a
biochip transponder, an automobile that has built-in sensors
to alert the driver when tire pressure is low - or any other
real or virtual object that can be assigned an IP address and
provided with the ability to transfer data over a network. The

concept of IoT is to make every single network enabled

object in the world network-connected and extend Internet into
the real world embracing everyday objects. [3] defines IoT as
a self-configured dynamic global network infrastructure with
standards and interoperable communication protocols where
physical and virtual things have identities, physical attributes
and virtual personalities, and are seamlessly integrated into the
information infrastructure. The key characteristics of an IoT
can be summarised as [6], [7]:
the ubiquitous nature of connectivity
the global identification of every thing
the ability of each thing to send and receive data across
the Internet or the private network they are connected to
The IoT is a multi-disciplinary concept. The implementation
is through the integration of technologies in the fields of
communications, networking, data acquisition, data fusion,
cloud computing, security, decision making and etc. [8]. The
enabling technologies can be categorised in terms of their
competency levels:
Technology level - technologies for connecting real or
virtual smart objects within the information infrastructure
under strong energy and environmental constraints, i.e.
individual wireless sensing capabilities;
Communication and networking level - technologies for
providing the massive efficient, dynamic, flexible and
secure communication networking;
Intelligence level - technologies for providing data fusion
and service discovery where data collected by individual
smart network enabled objects such as RFID and
wireless sensors are used by distributed users.

Fig. 1. Water consumption monitoring system

III. W IRELESS WATER CONSUMPTION MONITORING

SYSTEM

A. System architecture
The household water consumption monitoring system is
designed for collecting detailed information on the amount
and the way water is used in a household. The system, as
shown in Fig. 1, consists of a local wireless monitoring unit in
each household and a remote central server. The local wireless
monitoring unit includes a few wireless data collectors, a
WiFi router and a WiFi gateway. The wireless monitoring
unit is responsible for collecting local water consumption data
in each household. The collected data is transmitted to the
remote central server through the home WiFi network and the
Internet. The remote central server receives data from multiple
household monitoring units.
B. Wireless data collector
A tailed wireless data collector was designed to collect
water flow rate and water temperature and then send to the
WiFi gateway wirelessly. No configuration is required as the
data collector can automatically connect with the nearest WiFi
gateway.
The indicators of the wireless data collector is shown in
Table I. The wireless data collector has the following features:

Power: Standard 5V DC from mains power adaptor.

Network topology: Many to one star network. Support
maximum 10-nodes to 1-node star communication.
Signal transmission: One way signal transmission. A
delay collision avoidance is used.
LED Indicators: Power LED and Communication LED.
When data is transmitting the LED will be flashing. The
power LED indicates the power supply status (on or off).
Power switch: No power switch. Start when power is on.
Power saver mode: The data collection node constantly
detects the status of the flow rate sensor. In the status
of zero-flow the transmission node will be in a sleep
mode and data transmission stops for energy saving. Once
any none zero-flow is detected the transmission node is
activated and the transmission is resumed.
Configuration: The sensor reading rate is fixed at one
second in order to catch the real-time feature of the water
consumption, but the transmission rate, called sampling
interval, can be pre-specified as Fast, Middle or
Slow by setting a dial switch inside the closure of the
data collector.

There are two types of wireless data collectors used in the

system as shown in Fig. 2, one with dual sensors which can
be connected with two flow rate/temperature sensors, and the
other with a single sensor which can only be connected with
one flow rate/temperature sensor. The flow rate/temperature
sensor used together with the wireless data collector is shown
in Fig. 3. Sensors are installed on water supply pipes at
different spots in a household, such as kitchen tap, dishwasher,
washing machine, shower, toilet and etc., to detect flow
rate/temperature for different use purposes.

TABLE I
I NDICATOR OF WIRELESS DATA COLLECTOR
Wireless Data Collector

Front Panel

Identifiers

Description

DC IN

5v DC power input port

Sensor 1

Water flow ratetemperature sensor

Sensor 2

Water flow ratetemperature sensor (only for dual sensor wireless data collector)

Power (PWR)

Indicator lights up when normal supply of power is on

Wireless communication

Always be off and be flash when sending data out

Indicator Light

(a) Single sensor

(b) Dual sensors

Fig. 2. Single (Dual) sensor wireless data collector

TABLE II
G ATEWAY I NDICATORS
WiFi gateway

Front Panel

Identifiers

Description

LAN

Local configuration interface, connect with 10/100 BaseT-Ethernet network card

DC IN

5V DC power input port

RESET

Long press for 5s to wipe user data and restore factory defaults

433M

433M antenna interface

WIFI

2.4G WIFI antenna interface

Power

Indicator lights up when normal supply of power is on

433M

Always in off state and one flash when receiving data from wireless data collectors

WIFI

Indicator lights up when module connects with router and sending data out

Back Panel

Indicator Light

Fig. 3. Flow rate/temperature sensor connected with the wireless data collector
Fig. 5. Remote server application model

Fig. 4. WiFi gateway device

As shown in Fig. 5, the server application is divided into

four levels. The lowest level is the database. This level is
responsible for setting up collections to the database and
supplying a connection interface to the upper level. The
database operator level operates the database by utilizing the
database operator interface. The most important level in this
application is the data process service, through which the
encapsulated data enters the application and transfer to other
levels. The listening socket receives data from the server port
and transfers these messages to the data process service. The
response socket aims to send the request of corresponding data
back to the sensor devices if necessary. The highest level is the
windows form, which contains all of the visual components
and event processes. The window form is operated by the
administrator with access control.
E. Implementation of the system

C. Wireless gateway
A tailed wireless gateway was designed as shown in Fig. 4
with the indicators shown in Table II.
The WiFi gateway has two functions:
receiving data from one or more wireless data collectors
through a 433MHz communication channel;
converting the signal into a WiFi signal and passing it to
the WiFi router.
It works regularly in a predefined interval although data
received from wireless data collectors may arrive at the gateway at any moment. There is no synchronization mechanism
between the wireless data collectors and the gateway.
The WiFi gateway can be configured wirelessly through
smart phone, PAD, PC and other mobile devices at the
household where the monitoring unit is located. Alternatively a
local PC can be also used for configuration through a standard
Ethernet.
D. Remote server software
A remote server software was also developed as a part
of the system to receive the sensed data from households in
different locations The server software is developed based on
Visual Studio 2012 and Microsoft SQL server 2014. The server
requires .NET framework 4.5 or above.

The system was tested and implemented in three steps:

firstly test in the laboratory in Loughborough University
after finishing the design, development and hardware
manufacturing;
secondly, a single system was installed in a domestic
house in Sosnowiec, Poland and in Skiathos, Greece
respectively (The server software was only installed in
Poland to look after the systems in both countries);
finally install all the massive productions in the remaining
28 recruited households, 9 in Sosnowiec, Poland and 19
in Skiathos, Greece. Near real-time monitoring of water
consumption in the total 30 households has been carried
out from March 2015 on.
IV. A PPLICATION RESULTS
The designed water consumption monitoring system has
been in use since March 2015. Water usage in 30 households,
10 in Sosnowiec, Poland and 20 Skiathos, Greece is being
measured in real-time, transmitted in a 30-second interval and
stored in a central database located in Poland. One example of
house water flow rate from 07/03 19/05 is illustrated in Fig. 6.
In order to reduce the network communication load and
energy consumption of sensing a number of strategies have

Fig. 6. Water consumption of a household during 7 March to 19 May 2015

Fig. 7. Web portal of water consumption systems in Skiathos.

been implemented in the monitoring system. The typical one is

sending data only if there is non-zero measurement detected or
a significant change in the measurement occurred. Otherwise
only the status of the household system is required by the
central server. The statuses of the monitoring systems installed
in those 30 households are centrally managed through two web
portals for both Poland and Greece. Fig. 7 is the snapshot of
the web page for the maintenance, which provides a status
overview of each wireless gateway of individual households
in Skiathos.
V. L ESSONS LEARNED AND LIMITATIONS
Several lessons can be learnt from and limitations have been
recognised in the process of development and deployment of
the water consumption monitoring system:
1) Data access authorisation. During the deployment process, households are quite concerned of how the collected data is used. Currently, the data access is authorised by the trial (or server) administrator with the
concern of households. However, the authorisation is

no transparent to trial households and any further extending the data usage scope will need to discuss with
households repeatedly. The current practice needs faceto-face explanation and discussion. Thus, such process
could take a long time to settle the alteration. Potentially,
the concept of IoT cannot be realised and IoT system
becomes telematics system which can only serve designated applications. One feasible solution is to enable the
data owner (e.g. household) to timely authorise the data
access with concise information via on-line management
system.
2) End-to-end self-healing mechanism. Although the IoT
water monitoring system has built-in self-healing mechanism to overcome the instability of public Internet
network, it still cannot maintain the system without
human intervention. The system uses the households
broadband Internet access to realise the wider data
access (e.g. global access). However, the system is not
integrated with the broadband router and cannot control
the broadband router. Once, the broadband router fails
to regain the Internet access. It is required households
recycle the power of router in order to regain the Internet
access. It is highly desirable that an integrated system
to ensure the end-to-end data delivery.
3) Single data access interface. The current implementation
separates the real-time data access interface and the
historical data access interface. It poses the difficulty
to IoT application development to use the IoT data. In
order to speed up the IoT application development, it is
desirable to have a single data access interface.
4) A single failure point. The current system has a single
failure point at the central database. No applications
could be available if this central database was blocked
for some reasons. Therefore a distributed database or
an in-network database might be a solution which could
remove this single failure point in the IoT system.
VI. C ONCLUSIONS
This paper reports a case study of IoT for water usage management. The IoT based water consumption system
was developed in Loughborough University in the UK and
deployed in Sosnowiec in Poland and Skiathos in Greece.
Two parts are sharing a same central database system. The
system has been in use since March 2015 and receiving the
water consumption and water temperature in real time for 30
households where 10 in Sosnowiec and 20 in Skiathos. Though
the devices and the associated software were tailored for a
European Commission FP7 programme funded project ISSEWATUS they are applicable for general use as the associated
industrial standards have been satisfied in the process of design
and manufacturing. In terms of authors knowledge these global
water monitoring devices and system cannot be found from
off-the-shelf. In terms of the research contribution a number
of lessons learned have been summarized which may highlight
the future direction of IoT research from practical aspects.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is part of the ISS-EWATUS project (issewatus.eu)
and has been funded by the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and
demonstration under grant agreement no (619228).
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