Challenges and Solutions for Advanced Sensing of Water Infrastructures in Urban Environments. Presentation of Suciu et al. at 21. IEEE international symposium for design and technology in electronic packaging (SIITME).

1. Challenges and Solutions for Advanced Sensing of
Water Infrastructures in Urban Environments
• George Suciu, Adela Vintea, Stefan Ciprian Arseni
Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and IT
University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest
• Cristina Butca, Victor Suciu
BEIA Consult International
R&D Deapartment
@GeorgeSuciuG #SIITME2015

2. Content
Short Biography
Introduction
Related Work
Advanced Sensing of Water Infrastructures
Evaluation and Results
Conclusions and Discussions
G. Suciu, et.al. (2015)
@GeorgeSuciuG #SIITME2015

3. Short Biography (1)
Graduated from the Faculty of Electronics,
Telecommunications and Information Technology at
the University “Politehnica” of Bucharest (UPB),
Romania (www.upb.ro)
MBA in Informatics Project Management from the
Faculty of Cybernetics, Statistics and Economic
Informatics of the Academy of Economic Studies
Bucharest (www.ase.ro)
Currently, Ph.D. Eng. Post-doc Researcher focused
on the field of big data, cloud communications, open
source, IPR and IoT/M2M
Since 2008 IT&C Solutions Manager - R&D
Department, being employed starting 1998 at BEIA
Consult International, a research performing SME
(www.beiaro.eu)
G. Suciu, et.al. (2015)G. Suciu, et.al. (2015) @GeorgeSuciuG #SIITME2015

4. Short Biography (2)
Projects – www.beiaro.eu / www.mobcomm.pub.ro
FP7 (2 on-going)
REDICT : Regional Economic Development by ICT
eWALL : Electronic Wall for Active Long Living
NMSDMON : Network Management System Development and Monitoring
FAIR : Friendly Application for Interactive Receiver
Cloud Consulting : Cloud-based Automation of ERP and CRM software for Small Businesses
ACCELERATE: A Platform for the Acceleration of go-to market in the ICT industry
H2020 (3 on-going)
SWITCH: Software Workbench for Interactive, Time Critical and Highly self-adaptive Cloud applications (ICT-9)
Power2SME - Cloud Platform for intelligent energy use by SMES
Speech2Platform - Smart, natural language semantic analyser platform to process oriented back-ends
National (more than 10 past projects, 5 on-going)
MobiWay: Mobility Beyond Individualism: an Integrated Platform for Intelligent Transportation Systems of Tomorrow
EV-BAT: Redox battery with fast charging capacity as a main source of energy for electric autovehicles
CarbaDetect: Imuno-biosensors for fast detection of carbamic pesticide residues (carbaryl, carbendazim) in horticultural products
SARAT-IWSN : Scalable Radio Transceiver for Instrumental Wireless Sensor Networks
COMM-CENTER : Developing of a “cloud communication center" by integrating a call/contact center platform with unified communication
technology, CRM system, “text-to-speech” and “automatic speech recognition” solutions in different languages (including Romanian)
G. Suciu, et.al. (2015)G. Suciu, et.al. (2015) @GeorgeSuciuG #SIITME2015

5. Introduction
Our hypothesis is that in order to extract relevant information from a sensor network
placed to monitor or control urban environments, the data received has to be first
manipulated to determine the most impactful components and then analysed.
At urban construction sites, huge numbers of automatic monitoring sensors are installed in the
influence zone of the construction along the city, above ground and underground.
We observed that quite often sensors are damaged or cannot transfer their data temporarily.
In these cases, safety-relevant data is lost quite often making data interpretation impossible.
This paper presents a method to solve more efficiently the often occurring ‘missing data’
problem when monitoring under difficult urban environmental conditions, compared to
existing solutions.
The main contribution of the paper consists in evaluating the challenges of monitoring
urban environments and designing an advanced sensing system for water infrastructures.
G. Suciu, et.al. (2015)G. Suciu, et.al. (2015) @GeorgeSuciuG #SIITME2015

6. Related Work
EMNET is a typical real-time water environment monitoring systems of based on WSNs
(wireless sensor network) that can monitor, analyze and control the water parameters.
LakeNet is an embedded wireless sensor network constructed by an interdisciplinary
team of hydrogeologists, environmental engineers, and electrical engineers at the
University of Notre Dame.
Off-the-shelf temperature, dissolved oxygen, and pH probes are suspended from floating,
waterproof cases with electronics, forming sensor pods.
Wireless transmission to relay stations and a PC gateway enable researchers to interact with
the network remotely to alter sampling patterns, download data, and analyze data trends using
the gateway's recursive processing of raw data.
SmartCoast is a Multi Sensor System for water quality monitoring.
The main parameters that the system monitor are: temperature, phosphate, dissolved oxygen,
conductivity, pH, turbidity and water level.
To meet the low power consumption requirements of the deployment scenario envisaged the
communication standard in the WSN is Zigbee implemented on the Tyndall mote.
G. Suciu, et.al. (2015)G. Suciu, et.al. (2015) @GeorgeSuciuG #SIITME2015

7. Advanced Sensing of Water Infrastructures
The system is based on an underwater sensor network which is connected to a cloud
platform by means of a reconfigurable wireless transceiver.
The sensor network integrates several low cost sensors that can measure different
parameters such as water level, the water flow, temperature, pressure.
The sensors must be able to perform self-configuration and calibration, and also they have to
adapt to these environment conditions.
The measured parameters will be transmitted through an operational communication
node, which should be able to ensure a reliable communication with timing and variation
delay constraints.
All this information is available in a cloud platform responsible for the collection of
environmental data.
The platform provides an interface that users can access anywhere via Internet.
Each remote monitoring installation consists of an GSM-GPRS remote terminal unit (RTU),
a water level sensor, temperature sensor, etc. which is connected to the RTU through an
atmospheric pressure relief box and the solar panel that powers the RTU and the sensor.
G. Suciu, et.al. (2015)G. Suciu, et.al. (2015) @GeorgeSuciuG #SIITME2015

8. The system mainly consists of remote monitoring installations, an data concentration
unit (gateway) and the Central Server presented at a conceptual level in Fig. 1. A
special applications server will be utilized for tasks eventually situated outside the
possibilities of the Central Server.
Advanced Sensing of Water Infrastructures
G. Suciu, et.al. (2015)G. Suciu, et.al. (2015) @GeorgeSuciuG #SIITME2015
Fig. 1. Components of the urban environment sensing system.

9. Evaluation and Results
The system provides information based on the data obtained from various sensors that
measure parameters like water level, water flow, temperature, pressure, but also some
parameters that define the environment quality like water quality and environmental
data of soil and air.
Our end user application displays a human readable representation of the measurement data.
The application will handle around 500-1000 sensors from different regions in Romania.
The values of some attributes characterizing the entities that are relevant to the
application will be calculated based on the combination of measures captured from
multiple sensors.
The entity may be considered the telemetry station (entities may be of several types - eg.
several types of stations), and depending on the sensors mounted on the station are defined
the attributes and metadata of the station entity.
Data acquisition is made with a temporal mark, represented by a GPS, so the system
must be able to restore and analyse the ongoing of a process, regardless the delay. To
accomplish a set of the requirements for a real time communication, at the physical
layer of the communication system it is proposed a transmission technique based on
OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing).
G. Suciu, et.al. (2015)G. Suciu, et.al. (2015) @GeorgeSuciuG #SIITME2015

10. One example of displaying a typical measurement result is shown in Fig. 2 for a
constellation of 59 sensors and 13 measurement points. The figure displays the water
level variation (elevation) with regard to position of the tunnel in a water
management infrastructure from a smart urban environment.
Evaluation and Results
G. Suciu, et.al. (2015)G. Suciu, et.al. (2015) @GeorgeSuciuG #SIITME2015
Fig. 2. The ratio of water level variation (elevation) and position in a water tunnel

11. Conclusions
In this paper we presented a monitoring system for water infrastructure monitoring in
urban environments which is based on an underwater sensor network which is connected
to a cloud platform by means of a reconfigurable wireless transceiver.
The system mainly consists of remote monitoring installations, an data concentration unit
(gateway) and the Central Server.
The system provides information based on the data obtained from various sensors that
measure parameters like water level, water flow, temperature, pressure, but also some
parameters that define the environment quality like water quality and environmental data
of soil and air.
G. Suciu, et.al. (2015)G. Suciu, et.al. (2015) @GeorgeSuciuG #SIITME2015

12. University “POLITEHNICA“ of Bucharest
Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications & Information Technology
Any questions ?
george@beia.ro
The work has been funded by the Sectoral Operational Programme Human Resources Development 2007-2013 of the Ministry of
European Funds through the Financial Agreement POSDRU/159/1.5/S/134398.
G. Suciu, et.al. (2015)G. Suciu, et.al. (2015) @GeorgeSuciuG #SIITME2015

13. References
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G. Suciu, et.al. (2015)G. Suciu, et.al. (2015) @GeorgeSuciuG #SIITME2015