An Internet of Things Framework for Smart Water Metering System for India

Abstract

Water is an essential requirement of a living thing. The scarcity of pure drinking water is the biggest challenge for densely populated countries like India. In some states of India there is a high scarcity of water. There are many reasons for scarcity of water. Wastage of water is one of the major issues. When people at some places are getting unlimited water, they are least bothered to restrict the usage. If the water is utilized properly then the remaining water can be supplied to other places. One of the solutions to stop water wastage is to have a metering system. Like other metering systems, nowadays water metering is also in its implementation mode. When users will have to pay for their usage, automatically the usage will be restricted. There are three ways of implementing metering system. 1. Manual water meter reading system or traditional water metering, which is having user intervention. 2. Automatic water meter reading system, wherein a person goes and scan the reading from the water meter at customer s place. 3. Smart water metering system where water meters will communicate with service provider and user with the help of mobile will be able to see the usage information and billing details. No user involvement is needed to read the water meter data or calculate and generate bill. This type of Smart water metering can help to resolve the problem of water wastage up to some extent which can help to solve scarcity issue.Internet of Things (IoT) is a mechanism where smart devices connect and communicate within a network. It plays a major role for developing smart city applications like smart water metering. Characteristics of IoT includes scalability, heterogeneity, communication and computation power efficiency and security. However, some major challenges in IoT are connectivity with reference to a large scale of devices, different protocol standards and working with limited battery powers.