A Review on Wireless Sensor Network for Water Pipeline Monitoring ...

A Review on Wireless Sensor Network for Water Pipeline Monitoring Applications Mohammed S. BenSaleh, Syed Manzoor Qasim and Abdulfattah M. Obeid

Alberto Garcia-Ortiz Institute of Electrodynamics and Microelectronics (ITEM) Integrated Digital Systems University of Bremen Bremen, Germany [email protected]

National Electronics, Comm. and Photonics Center King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology Riyadh, Saudi Arabia {mbensaleh, mqasim, obeid}@kacst.edu.sa

Abstract—Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained a lot of attention from researchers both from academia and industry during the past decade. This key technology enables a wide range of potential applications and services including monitoring of physical environments, enhanced industrial control, surveillance, remote health care and logistics. Real-time monitoring of water pipeline network is one such application where WSN plays significant role. The issue of water is considered to be one of the largest and most serious challenges. It is expected to aggravate over time, given the scarcity of available traditional water resources and the massive costs of providing fresh potable water from non-traditional sources such as desalination plants. Therefore, a robust and reliable WSN technique is required to monitor leaks, bursts and other anomalies in the water pipeline systems. This paper presents a consolidated review on WSN for water pipeline monitoring applications.

Figure 1. Architecture of typical WSN node

A large number of applications have been proposed for WSN. These applications are mostly related to tracking and monitoring of some physical phenomenon. Monitoring applications include environment monitoring, health monitoring, pipeline monitoring of water, oil and gas, seismic and civil structure (buildings, bridges etc.) monitoring. Tracking applications include tracking vehicles, animals, humans and other objects [2].

Keywords- Leak detection, pipeline monitoring, research trends, water supply, wireless sensor network (WSN).

I.

INTRODUCTION

Wireless sensor network (WSN) has emerged as a technology of choice for several applications due to the significant advancement in micro electro mechanical system (MEMS) based low-cost, small sized intelligent sensors, low power and highly integrated digital electronics and wireless communication technology [1]. WSN consists of large number of autonomous battery-powered multi-functional sensor nodes, also known as motes. A WSN node typically consists of a sensor, processor which could be a microcontroller, digital signal processor (DSP), field programmable gate array (FPGA) or application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), transceiver, power source and radio as shown in fig. 1.

According to World Bank report, the worldwide water loss is estimated to amount to 48.6 billion cubic meters per year with a monetary loss of approximately US$ 14.6 billion per year [3]. Water is a precious and important resource, hence protecting and using the water supplies wisely is a responsibility shared by everyone living on earth. The issue of water is considered to be one of the largest and most serious challenges. It is expected to aggravate over time, given the scarcity of available traditional water resources and the massive costs of providing fresh potable water from non-traditional sources such as desalination plant. Huge and long water pipelines have become an indispensable part of such infrastructure.

The focus is on three important subsystems used for sensing, processing, and communicating. These motes are densely deployed to measure a given physical environment. Different mechanical, thermal, biological, chemical, optical and magnetic sensors may be attached to the mote to measure properties of the environment. Due to the limited capability and accessibility of motes, a radio is implemented for wireless communication to transfer the sensed data to a base station usually located in a remote site for further processing [1], [2].

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For example, Saudi Arabia which is a global leader in water desalination heavily depends on over 4000 km of pipeline to transport water from several desalination plants scattered throughout the kingdom. Active monitoring and inspection is thus required to maintain the health of the pipelines. Especially, monitoring long distance water pipeline is a challenging task because of the difficulties in maintaining the system [4].

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There has been increasing awareness and consolidated effort to use a robust and reliable technique to monitor leaks, bursts and other anomalies in the system. A significant amount of research and development work has been initiated by several research groups in the recent years to tackle this problem. This paper reviews recent research and development work on WSN technology in order to monitor water pipelines.

III.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II presents the motivation for using WSN in water pipeline monitoring application. Different pipeline monitoring techniques are reviewed and summarized in section III. The work related to the use of WSN for water pipeline monitoring application is reviewed and summarized in section IV. Finally, section V concludes the paper. II.

REVIEW OF PIPELINE MONITORING TECHNIQUES

Monitoring pipelines passing through long stretches of remote and inaccessible terrain is a challenge. Normally, pipelines buried under the ground are preferred for transporting water and other fluids. This provides protection and prevents damage to the pipeline upto certain extent. However, it also has some serious drawbacks, such as exposure to stress due to the change in the surrounding earth and other geotechnical events, which may cause ruptures and disruptions in the pipeline. To overcome this problem, several techniques have been reported in the literature. Based on the location of the sensors these techniques are divided into the following two types [12]. A. Non-invasive techniques (sensors placed outside the pipeline) Some of the popular non-invasive techniques used under this category for aboveground and underground pipelines are visual inspection and GPR respectively. Visual inspection uses image and video sensors to localize the leakage or burst in the pipeline [13]. It is suitable for monitoring pipelines located above the ground. For pipelines located under the ground, GPR is a suitable technique [14]. All these pipeline monitoring techniques does not support real-time analysis. It requires some level of human intervention to accomplish the task which is not very effective. Soil humidity sensors are also used to detect the leakage in water pipelines. These sensors are connected to wire based communication system which transmits the measurement to a remote processing system in real-time. However, this technique is not reliable as the communication is compromised if the wire is damaged by any means.

MOTIVATION FOR USING WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

The global consumption of water has increased considerably due to the increase in population worldwide. Since fresh potable water is a scarce commodity, it needs to be conserved. Government organization and utility companies invest considerable amount of money in the maintenance of water pipeline network infrastructure. One of the major problems pipeline may encounter is the leakage. Leaks are categorized into two main types: supply (service) line leaks and valve (joint) leaks [5]. Depending on the magnitude of the leak flow, leakage can also be categorized into main two types. The first type is referred to as slow leaks, which is usually of small size when it occurs but develops gradually over time. The second type of leak is sudden burst with a greater leak flow which occurs mostly due to pipeline or joint break. In most cases, largest portion of water is lost through leaks in supply lines.

B. Invasive techniques (sensors placed inside the pipeline) Invasive technique involves monitoring the internal pipelines parameters such as pressure, flow rate, temperature, density or viscosity. Acoustic techniques are suitable for sensing and detecting small leakages in pipeline. A large number of acoustic sensors are placed inside the pipeline to detect vibrations generated by small leakage. Flow sensors could also be used inside the pipeline to monitor the flow difference due to leakage. However, this is not an accurate technique to localize the position of leakage in the pipeline. A rarefaction wave is produced in the pipeline when a leak occurs in a pipeline. The wave propagates both upstream and downstream with the speed of sound from the location of leakage. Pressure sensors are deployed to measure the pressure gradient with respect to time. Again this technique cannot provide enough accuracy for leakage detection [12].

The leakage is sometimes also due to the usage of old pipelines, inadequate corrosion protection, poorly maintained valves and sometimes due to mechanical damage. The temperature, velocity and pressure of water may also be a contributing factor. External conditions, such as contact with other structures, stray electric currents from other utilities (in case of buried pipelines) and freezing soil around a pipe can also contribute to leakage [5]. In order to conserve water, detection and repair of leaks in the pipeline is very important. Water pipeline should employ advance monitoring techniques for detection and location of leakage. Several non-WSN techniques for detecting leaks in water pipelines are reported in open literature [6], [7]. These include tracer gases [8] and ground penetrating radars (GPR) [9] for underground leak detection which are very efficient but costly and intrusive in nature.

IV.

Other techniques such as acoustic sensors, geophones and microphones are also employed for pipeline monitoring [10], [11]. These techniques normally require a direct wired connection (copper wires or optical fibers) to communicate with the sensor which makes it unsuitable for monitoring long distance pipelines. Wired networks expose the water pipeline infrastructure to unauthorized person or intruder who could disable the monitoring system by cutting the wires. If the wires are damaged, the whole pipeline monitoring system is compromised.

WATER PIPELINE MONITORING USING WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

The pipeline monitoring techniques presented in the earlier sections are costly and inefficient. They lack responsiveness and often report the problem after substantial amount of water is wasted. Significant human intervention is also required. These challenges are overcome by deploying WSNs in the field to continuously monitor a pipeline and provide an early warning system when leakage occurs [15]. Jawhar et al.

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alarms. NAWMS, a scalable, non-intrusive, autonomous and adaptive water monitoring system is presented in [21]. It detects and locates leakage using low cost wireless vibration sensors that are attached externally to the pipes. It can be used at household level to provide information about water consumption. It uses a novel feedback mechanism that continuously recalibrates the sensors and thus minimizes the estimation error for the total water consumption.

presented an initial framework for using linear WSN for oil, gas, and water pipeline monitoring applications [16]. A pipeline monitoring WSN typically consist of sensor nodes which captures the information in and around a pipeline. These sensor nodes are then connected to gateway nodes for data aggregation and processing. The processed data is then transmitted to a remote base station. The interconnected nodes make this network topology quite reliable. If there is a hardware failure in one node, the complementary nodes find an alternative route to maintain the data transmission. In addition to information sensing and data transmission, these nodes are also capable of event localization to determine where an incident has occurred [17]. There are three different scenarios of installing the pipeline: underwater and aboveground or underground. The use of WSN under these scenarios will be reviewed and presented in the following subsections.

TriopusNet is a mobile WSN system which is used for autonomous pipeline monitoring [22]. In this system, sensor nodes are automatically released from a centralized repository located at the source of the water pipeline and carried forward by the water flow. The placement of the node is done automatically based on sensor deployment algorithm. Each node includes a motor which allows the three (trio) arms to latch onto pipe’s inner surface. More details of the Triopus node can be found in [22]. As compared to Pipenet, no human effort is required to install and repair sensor nodes in the TriopusNet system.

A. Underwater pipeline monitoring Different sensor network architectures for monitoring underwater pipeline infrastructures are presented in [18]. These architectures are broadly classified based on the type of network connectivity such as wired networks, wireless networks, or a combination of these. These architectures are underwater wired sensor networks, underwater acoustic WSNs, radio frequency (RF) WSNs, integrated wired/acoustic WSNs, and integrated wired/RF WSNs [19]. Wired networks are susceptible to unauthorized access thus compromising the security and reliability of underwater pipeline infrastructure. WSNs can solve some of the reliability issues of current wired networks used in pipeline monitoring.

Mohamed and Jawhar presented fault-tolerant architecture based on integrated wired and wireless senor network for monitoring above-ground pipeline infrastructures which provides better reliability [23]. A novel low-cost, scalable, customizable and autonomous sensor-based system called SPAMMS is presented in [24]. This system combines sensing technology with robot agent based technology to provide active and corrective monitoring and maintenance of the pipelines. SPAMMS combines RFID systems with mobile sensors and autonomous robots to monitor pipelines. A comparison of various pipeline monitoring techniques is also very well presented in this paper [24].

Acoustic sensor nodes could be deployed on the pipeline. These nodes consist of an acoustic transceiver, processor, battery, memory, and small storage in addition to one or more sensor devices. Underwater acoustic WSNs have some severe drawbacks such as limited communication bandwidth, very high propagation delay, high bit error rate (BER), high power consumption due to advanced signal processing techniques and limited battery life.

Underground pipelines are mostly preferred to transport water from remote locations. It provides the safest way to transport water but at the cost of extreme environmental conditions under the ground which may cause leakage on the pipelines [12], [25], [26]. Zhi et al. presented a low-cost magnetic induction waveguide based WSN technique for underground pipeline monitoring (MISE-PIPE) for detecting and localizing leakages in underground pipelines [12]. Two type of sensors are used, one placed inside and the other placed outside the pipeline. Both internal and external sensors provide necessary data for detecting and localizing the leakage in the underground pipeline. This technique provides accurate realtime leakage detection and improved lifetime for the underground pipelines.

RF WSN is another option available for monitoring underwater pipelines. In this type of WSN, radio tansceivers are placed on the surface buoys which are connected to the sensor nodes placed underwater. RF WSNs provide better bandwidth, propogation delay, BER, and low power consumption as compared to acoustic WSN. But it has some security issues which can compromise the pipeline infrastructure. To overcome these issues, integrated wired/acoustic WSNs and integrated wired/RF WSNs are proposed in [18], [19].

Masanobu et al. presented PipeTECT, an intelligent WSN system for real-time nondestructive monitoring of underground water pipelines [27]. The proposed system utilizes MEMS accelerometers to measure the vibration on the pipe surface in order to determine the change in the water pressure caused by pipe rupture and thus localize the leakage. The presented system is scalable with the option of adding other sensing devices. Some of the challenges faced with this system include reliable long range communication, precise time synchronization, power management and effective bandwidth usage [27]. Mustafa and Chou further improved the PipeTECT system by adding new modules at both the sensing and data aggregation unit while reducing the total energy consumption

B. Aboveground/underground pipeline monitoring A number of WSN based solutions for both aboveground and underground pipeline monitoring have been proposed in the literature. PipeNet is one such system which is used for automated detection, localization and quantification of leaks, bursts and other anomalies (blockages or malfunctioning control valves) in large diameter bulk water transmission pipelines [20]. It employs accelerometer sensors to measure vibrations that can result from the presence of cracks in the pipeline. It provides near real-time operation with few false

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[12] Z. Sun, P. Wang, M. C. Vuran, M. A. Al-Rodhaan, A. M. Al-Dhelaan, and I. F. Akyildiz, “MISE-PIPE: Magnetic induction-based wireless sensor networks for underground pipeline monitoring,” Ad Hoc Networks, Vol.9, No.3, pp.218-227, May 2011. [13] J. Zhang, “Designing a cost effective and reliable pipeline leak detection system,” in Proc. of Pipeline Reliability Conference, Nov. 1996. [14] M. Bimpas, A. Amditis, and N. Uzunoglu, “Detection of water leaks in supply pipes using continuous wave sensor operating at 2.45 GHz,” Journal of Applied Geophysics,Vol.70, pp.226-236, 2010. [15] A. Santos and M. Younis, “A sensor network for non-intrusive and efficient leak detection in long pipelines,” in Proc. of 2011 IFIP Wireless Days (WD), Oct. 2011, pp.1-6. [16] I. Jawhar, N. Mohamed, and K. Shuaib, “A Framework for pipeline infrastructure monitoring using wireless sensor networks, in Proc. of Wireless Telecommunications Symposium (WTS’07), April 2007, pp.17. [17] G. Owojaiye and Y. Sun, “Focal design issues affecting the deployment of wireless sensor networks for pipeline monitoring,” Ad Hoc Networks, Oct. 2012, in press. [18] N. Mohamed, I. Jawhar, J. Al-Jaroodi, and L. Zhang, “Monitoring underwater pipelines using sensor networks,” in Proc. of 12th IEEE Int. Conf. on High Performance Computing and Communications, 2010, pp.346-353. [19] N. Mohamed, I. Jawhar, J. Al-Jaroodi, and L. Zhang, “Sensor network architectures for monitoring underwater pipelines,” Sensors, Vol.11, No.11, pp.10738-10764, 2011. [20] I. Stoianov, L. Nachman, S. Madden, and T. Tokmouline, “PIPENET: A wireless sensor network for pipeline monitoring,” in Proc. of the 6th Int. Symp. on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN’07), 2007, pp.264-273. [21] Y. Kim, T. Schmid, Z. M. Charbiwala, J. Friedman and M. B. Srivastava “NAWMS: Nonintrusive autonomous water monitoring system,” in Proc. of the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems (SenSys’08), 2008, pp.309-322. [22] T. T. Lai, W. Chen, K. H. Li, P. Huang, and H. H. Chu, “TriopusNet: Automating wireless sensor network deployment and replacement in pipeline monitoring,” in Proc. of 11th Int. Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN’12), April 2012, pp.61-71. [23] N. Mohamed and I. Jawhar, “A fault tolerant wired/wireless sensor network architecture for monitoring pipeline infrastructures,” in Proc. of the 2nd Int. Conf. on Sensor Technologies and Applications (SENSORCOMM’08), Aug. 2008, pp.179-184. [24] J. Kim, G. Sharma, N. Boudriga, and S. S. Iyengar, “SPAMMS: A sensor-based pipeline autonomous monitoring and maintenance system,” in Proc. of 2nd Int. Conf. on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS’10), Jan. 2010, pp.1-10. [25] I. F. Akyildiz and E. P. Stuntebeck, “Wireless underground sensor networks: research challenges,” Ad Hoc Networks, Vol.4, No.6, pp.669686, Nov. 2006. [26] A. Kadri, A. Abu-Dayya, D. Trinchero, and R. Stefanelli, “Autonomous sensing for leakage detection in underground water pipelines,” in Proc. of 5th IEEE Int. Conf. on Sensing Technology (ICST’11), Dec. 2011, pp.639-643. [27] M. Shinozuka, P. H. Chou, S. Kim, H. R. Kim, E. Yoon, H. Mustafa, D. Karmakar, and S. Pul, “Nondestructive monitoring of a pipe network using a MEMS-based wireless network,” in Proc. SPIE 7649, Nondestructive Characterization for Composite Materials, Aerospace Engineering, Civil Infrastructure, and Homeland Security, April 2010, pp.1-12. [28] H. Mustafa and P. H. Chou, “Embedded damage detection in water pipelines using wireless sensor networks,” in Proc. of 14th IEEE Int. Conf. on High Performance Computing and Communication and 9th IEEE Int. Conf. on Embedded Software and Systems (HPCCICESS’12), June 2012, pp.1578-1586. [29] http://www.libelium.com/smart_water_wsn_pipe_leakages (Accessed on 1 February 2013) [30] http://www.visenti.com/waterwise.html (Accessed on 1 February 2013)

significantly [28]. Some companies like Libelium [29] and Visenti [30] provide WSN based commercial solutions for water pipeline monitoring. V.

CONCLUSION

Water pipeline networks have become an essential part of life. It is considered as an important asset of a country. Hence continuous active monitoring and inspection system is required to maintain the health of the water pipelines. It is very important to have a robust and reliable system which is cost effective, scalable and customizable. Monitoring long distance water pipeline for leaks, bursts and other anomalies is a challenging task. WSNs have emerged as the technology of choice for water pipeline monitoring due to recent advancement in sensor, electronics and wireless communication technologies respectively. Several researchers have presented interesting solutions based on WSN to tackle these problems. This paper consolidates most of these researches and presents a review on the research and development work done in the area of water pipeline monitoring using WSN technology for different scenarios such as underwater, aboveground and underground. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was supported in part by the National Electronics, Communications and Photonics Research Center of King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST). REFERENCES [1]

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