Sensor Placement for Contamination Source Detection in Water Channel Networks

Abstract

Water quality is one of the important parameter responsible for public health. They are vulnerable to accidental or intentional chemical, physical, or biological contaminations. Water quality monitoring using sensor network has been there for some time now. One of the applications of the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is to monitor the Region of Interest (RoI). However, the deployment procedure of the sensor nodes needs to be designed such that it maximizes the resource utilization. The optimal sensor placement enables us to minimize the cost and obtain precise data on target condition. In this paper, we consider the sensor placement problem for full network coverage to detect the source of contaminants using minimum number of sensor nodes in water flow channels. Bipartite graph based method is proposed to design our algorithm to decide upon the sensor node positions for a network with directed flows. Epanet2.0 simulator and Matlab is used for developing our network model and simulating our proposed algorithm with synthetic as well as actual water flow networks. We considered a small sample water distribution area of Karimnagar (a municipal corporation in Telangana State, India) for validating our proposed algorithm.