IoT Based System for Sewage Overflow Prevention using Heterogeneous Communication Networks

Abstract

The increasing population along with water scarcity give rise to water management practices. Water scarcity can be eradicated by wastewater treatment that would in turn prevent contamination of water bodies. One of the challenges in wastewater treatment is to efficiently transport and treat the sewage in a Sewage Treatment Plant (STP). Most of the existing STPs in closed campuses of Indian scenarios such as academic institutions, industries, and residential apartments employ several pumping stations in a campus and pump motors in each station that pump sewage to STP for treatment. Manual operation of such motors would lead to sump overflows that negatively impact public health and sanitation. Therefore, an IoT-based system for monitoring and controlling sewage flow is proposed in this paper that uses water level sensors and prevents sewage overflows in pumping station sumps, resulting in the utilisation of all the collected sewage for treatment. Since each campus might have different communication networks such as GPRS, WiFi, RF, or Ethernet, the proposed system is designed to work with any network. The proposed system was tested in the college campus with three pumping stations. Moreover, a test bed was simulated and tested with 100 pumping stations. It is observed that the proposed approach prevents sewage overflows in various scenarios with different constraints.