New Protocol and Architecture for a Wastewater Treatment System Intended for Irrigation

• Main Authors: Jose M. Jimenez, Lorena Parra, Laura García, Jaime Lloret, Pedro V. Mauri, Pascal Lorenz
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-04-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: sensor network; LoRa; water quality; contamination; precision agriculture
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/8/3648

Water quality may be affected by aspects such as pollution from industries, agricultural fertilizers and pesticides, and waste produced by humans. This contamination can affect the produce of the fields irrigated by untreated water. Therefore, it is necessary to add a treatment process in irrigation systems. In this paper, an architecture, communication protocol, and a data analysis algorithm for a wastewater treatment system intended for irrigation are presented. Our system includes a smart group-based wireless sensor network that is able to detect high salinity levels and pollution stains, such as oil spills. When contamination is detected, the water is led into auxiliary canals that perform the biosorption process to treat the water and dump it back into the main canal. Simulations were performed to assess the amount of data stored on the secure digital (SD) card, the consumed bandwidth, and the energy consumption of our proposal. The results show the system has a low bandwidth consumption with a maximum of 2.58 kbps for the setting of two daily data transmissions of the node in the last auxiliary canal. Furthermore, it can sustain the energy consumption in adverse conditions, where the node with the highest energy consumption reaches the lowest energy value of 12,320 mW/h.