Environ Monit Assess (2018) 190:556
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-018-6914-x
Real-time water quality monitoring using Internet of Things
in SCADA
K. Saravanan & E. Anusuya & Raghvendra Kumar & Le Hoang Son
Received: 8 May 2018 / Accepted: 8 August 2018
# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Abstract Water pollution is the root cause for many
diseases in the world. It is necessary to measure water
quality using sensors for prevention of water pollution.
However, the related works remain the problems of com-
munication, mobility, scalability, and accuracy. In this
paper, we propose a new Supervisory Control and Data
Acquisition (SCADA) system that integrates with the In-
ternet of Things (IoT) technology for real-time water qual-
ity monitoring. It aims to determine the contamination of
water, leakage in pipeline, and also automatic measure of
parameters (such as temperature sensor, flow sensor, color
sensor) in real time using Arduino Atmega 368 using
Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) mod-
ule. The system is applied in the Tirunelveli Corporation
K. Saravanan : E. Anusuya
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Anna
University Regional Campus, Tirunelveli, Tamilnadu, India
K. Saravanan
e-mail: saravanan.krishnann@gmail.com
E. Anusuya
e-mail: anusuyaelraj@gmail.com
R. Kumar
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, LNCT
College, Jabalpur, MP, India
e-mail: raghvendraagrawal7@gmail.com
L. H. Son (*)
VNU Information Technology Institute, Vietnam National
University, Hanoi, Vietnam
e-mail: sonlh@vnu.edu.vn
(Metro city of Tamilnadu state, India) for automatic cap-
turing of sensor data (pressure, pH, level, and energy
sensors). SCADA system is fine-tuned with additional
sensors and reduced cost. The results show that the pro-
posed system outperforms the existing ones and produces
better results. SCADA captures the real-time accurate
sensor values of flow, temperature, and color and turbidity
through the GSM communication.
Keywords Sensors . Internet of Things . SCADA .
Water quality monitoring . Water distribution
Introduction
Pollution in any form (e.g., air, light, noise, soil contam-
ination, radioactive contamination, thermal, and water)
greatly impacts the quality of human life. The social
ecology and environmental conditions are influenced by
pollution. Due to growing urbanization, polluted ele-
ments get increased every day. Though there were seven
types of pollutions exist, water pollution is one of the
major problems in the world today (Smith et al. 2017). It
occurs due to contaminations discharged directly or
indirectly into water bodies. The bitter truth is that only
2% of planet water is fresh and 0.036% of water is
accessible for use (Kim et al. 2017). It was indicated
that polluted water is the root cause for many diseases in
the world (Panfili et al. 2017). A recent report in
(PressReader 2018) has shown that more than 14,000
people die daily around the world in which 580 people
in India die due to water pollution and related illness.
556 Page 2 of 16
Recent studies in India have shown that water pollution
is the major environmental challenge (Ahmed and
Ismail 2018). Dumping of waste and untreated sewage
are the reason for water pollution and several diseases to
living hood. In many countries, dirty or contaminated
water is still used as drinking water (Barabde and Danve
2015a). Even though the basic need of all living being is
water, its distribution in major cities still remains the
problem of rainfall and water leakage in the pipeline
(Creaco and Pezzinga 2015). Nowadays, contaminated
water causes more disease such as diarrhea due to con-
tamination of water in the water distribution system
(Sun et al. 2017).
There have been many researches done for mea-
suring water quality using sensors for prevention
of water pollution. Details of those researches can
be read in the BLiterature review^ section. In sum-
mary, those systems are built on the basis of
online and reagent-free water monitoring SCADA
systems in wired networks. However, they have
the following disadvantages:
a) Data transferred between sensors and the core net-
work use satellite-based communication technolo-
gies, which are quite costly and less comparatively
speed (Saravanan 2017). The Internet of Things
(IoT) technology generates huge data more fre-
quently and also off-loads computation and storage
to the cloud. Hence, it is necessary to use advanced
communication models. Cloud-based IoT is the cost
effective and reliable solution the for the many
sensor applications (Saravanan and Saraniya
2018). Patient health monitoring in hospitals and
animal livestock monitoring are using IoT devices.
b) Most of the existing SCADA systems store and
process data in a centralized server which displays
sensor values only in site locations. Due to mobility
and easy access of the platform, it is necessary to
generate reports through mobile platforms.
c) The existing SCADA systems lack scalability of
sensors since most of them were made with pro-
grammable logic control (PLC) controllers with
analog/digital modules. Thus, it is hard to add new
sensors.
d) Accuracy of sensor values from devices is not con-
fident enough to make decisions since output cali-
bration happens in the existing SCADA systems.
Remote Terminal Unit (RTU)-based SCADA IoT
alleviates this problem and improves the accuracy.
Environ Monit Assess (2018) 190:556
In this paper, we propose a new SCADA system that
integrates with the IoT technology for real-time water
quality monitoring. The contribution is threefold: (i)
Sensors module: easy integration of sensors by using
plug and play; (ii) Communication module: use of wire-
less 4G/5G technologies for real-time transfer of
SCADA data to the cloud; and (iii) Report generation
module: data analytics is performed in the SCADA
server to generate reports in web and mobile applica-
tions. Here, monitoring and maintaining the quality of
water across different stations in continuous manner are
done using the SCADA via wireless GSM module. It is
efficient to detect contamination of water and analyze
water quality regularly and automatically. Several com-
ponents are used for measuring such as water tempera-
ture, flow, pressure, pH, and color. Water quality is
measured in terms of physical and chemical parameters
to determine the condition of water.
BLiterature review^ section shows the related studies.
The BProposed system^ section proposes architecture,
followed by hardware design in the BDesign^ section.
Then, the BExperiments^ section presents experiments.
Finally, the BConclusion^ section concludes the work.
Literature review
Smart integrated water management with intelligent sens-
ing techniques has been used for real-time processing and
monitoring of flow data, e.g., the automatic water flow
meter (Zhenan et al. 2013), microcontroller-based automat-
ic water level control system (Ebere and Francisca 2013),
and grid-based wide area water quality measurement sys-
tems for surface water (Silva et al. 2011). In (Barabde and
Danve 2015b), water environment monitoring based on
IoT was designed to capture sensor data on web platform
using cloud services. Water quality monitoring system
using ZigBee network was used to send data to a target
area (Satish and Amruta 2013). SCADA system was
implemented in many smart city projects for effective
monitoring and controlling of devices. Specifically, a
real-time system for determination of drinking water qual-
ity with advanced contamination event detection algorithm
was given in (Devi and Abirami 2014). Multi-parametric
sensors are reviewed extensively to assist water quality and
measure pH values (Lin et al. 2017). Challenges in mea-
suring water quality were illustrated in (Wong and Kerkez
2016, b). Water temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen
level are measured and collected using IoT-based sensors
Environ Monit Assess (2018) 190:556
Temperature Sensor
Source
Server
Computer
Fig. 1 Architecture of the proposed water quality monitoring system
(Pranata et al. 2017). Light weight and low-cost turbidity
sensors are used with Light Emitting Diode (LED) trans-
mitter, Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) receiver, and PIC
16F777 processor for instant monitoring of water quality
in domestic environments (Azman et al. 2016). Water and
air monitoring system with four slave robots (two robots
for air; another two for water) was developed in (Agarwal
et al. 2018). IoT-enabled master drone can monitor the
conditions and alert the authorities when the water/air
contaminations found. An adaptive Kalman filtering burst
and leakage detection algorithm is implemented for con-
tinuous monitoring of intermittent water distribution net-
work (IWDN) to reduce the water loss due to leaks and
bursts (Afifi et al. 2018). IoT-based solutions for monitor-
ing the different aspects such as health conditions and
environments are proposed in different applications.
Saravanan and Srinivasan (2017) listed the IoT applica-
tions used in various cloud platforms.
An effective water pollution detection approach is
proposed based on hypothesis testing and algorithm
with implementation examples (Luo and Yang 2017).
Another real-time, in-pipe water monitoring using
Fig. 2 Block diagram of water monitoring device
Page 3 of 16 556
Flow Sensor
Colour Sensor Tank
Adriano
GSM Module Mobile
electrochemical and optical sensors was implemented
to assess water contamination in drinking water distri-
bution systems (Lambrou et al. 2014). Hydraulic net-
work simulation models are linked with SCADA system
to extract consistent data from sensors (Riis 2016).
Federated SCADA was proposed for the integration of
interoperated and associated SCADA systems using
common information space (Stoian et al. 2016). IoT-
based monitoring sensors to detect water quality param-
eters (e.g., pH, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, and
turbidity) were proposed in the Kerala state (Ramesh
et al. 2017). Similarly, Short Message Service (SMS)-
based water level indication system with secure IoT was
given (Parameswari and Balasingh 2018a, b). Cloud-
based Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) scheme to
monitor the pH, conductivity, and dissolved oxygen
parameters from wastewater was implemented using
ThingSpeak platform (Zakaria and Michael 2017). Sim-
ilar parameters were measured using Message Queuing
Telemetry Transport algorithm (Mir and Mehwish
2017). Secure Elliptic-Curve Cryptography algorithm
was developed for data transfer and storage of water
556 Page 4 of 16
Fig. 3 Block diagram for automatic water quality monitoring using Arduino
monitoring sensor data in the cloud (Jegadeesan et al.
2018). Turbidity and Rotobotix sensors were proposed
for smart city water supply using IoT. It can be used to
find the water leakage in the pipelines. Wifi-based water
quality monitoring using pH, turbidity and flow sensors
were implemented in Arduino Uno module (Kamaludin
et al. 2017). Others can be referred in (Asalmol et al.
2017; Anusuya and Saravanan 2017; Deutsch et al.
2018; Huang et al. 2017; Jácome et al. 2018; Jindal
et al. 2017a, b; Wong and Kerkez 2016, b).
Fig. 4 Block diagram of quality sensing unit (transmitting unit)
Environ Monit Assess (2018) 190:556
Proposed system
Architecture
The architecture of water quality monitoring system (see
Fig. 1) consists of various sensors, communication mod-
ule, and centralized server. In this architecture, sensors
are fitted in the pipeline and used to measure quality of
water in terms of temperature, color, and flow. Then, the
sensed data are sent to General Packet Radio Service
Environ Monit Assess (2018) 190:556
Fig. 5 Block diagram of the
monitoring sensing unit
(receiving unit)
(GPRS) module. If water quality is unusual and any
issues found in the sensor measurement, SCADA can
control the GSM module to send data to the monitoring
center. At the same time, data are also sent to mobile
phone, which is easy to take instant decisions accord-
ingly. Sensor analytics can be viewed in the SCADA
multidimensional report platform.
Block diagram of water monitoring devices
The real-time water quality monitoring system (Fig. 2)
consists of information tracking, storing, and continuous
processing in the water distribution system and
Start
Inialize the sensor and geng value from sensor
Result of the sensor sends to the Arduino board
No
Arduino values ≥
Threshold value
Yes
The sense data goes to the GSM module and send
the status of the water module
Respecve user can get the report from the web
page
Stop
Fig. 6 Flow chart for water quality monitoring system
Page 5 of 16 556
automatic reporting of the data. The proposed system
consists of three modules:
i. Sensor module: This sensor block is the input for the
system with interface parameters such as temperature
sensor, flow sensor, and color sensor from stations.
ii. Processing module: This block is for processing
sensed data from the sensor module. It is used to
monitor water quality condition by using sensor
parameters sent to the Arduino UNO (stands for
one in Italy) microcontroller.
iii. Communication module: This block is used for
communication between the sensor module and
processing module with the help of the GPRS
modem which connect Arduino microcontroller
to the Internet. Through the mobile handheld de-
vices or Personal Computers (PCs) connected to
the GPRS modem, status of water contamination
level is sent to the server, so that the details of the
water distribution are displayed in the web page.
GPRS provides mobile communication between
mobile users and the network with high-speed
wireless Internet Protocol (IP). The data rate up to
12 MBPS (megabyte per second).
Block diagram for automatic water quality monitoring
using Arduino
The block diagram of Arduino Uno module with its
connected components is depicted in Fig. 3 for
automatic water quality monitoring sensors. The
system consists of three parts: sensor unit with
different types of sensors, transmitting unit consists
of an Arduino Uno microcontroller to process the
data, and in the receiving unit, GSM modem con-
nects to the Internet. Then, data and status of water
contamination are displayed on the web server.
556 Page 6 of 16 Environ Monit Assess (2018) 190:556

Fig. 7 Circuit diagram for water quality monitoring system

Block diagram for transmitting and receiving unit Quality sensing unit

The proposed system water quality monitoring sys- Quality sensing unit, otherwise termed as transmitting
tem based on WSN can be divided in two parts unit is illustrated in Fig. 4. It consists of temperature
below. sensor, flow sensor, color sensor, a controller, and

Water monitoring Colour sensor

LM35 temperature system
sensor Arduino uno + GPRS
module

Flow sensor Pipe

Fig. 8 Hardware setup for water quality monitoring device in pipeline
Environ Monit Assess (2018) 190:556
Fig. 9 Hardware implementation
for water quality monitoring
device in pipeline
communication module. Here, the sensor data are given
to the microcontroller (ATmega 368). The inbuilt ADC
converts the analog signal to digital signal for further
processing with the help of the communication module.
The sensor data is visualized in the Liquid Crystal
Display (LCD) panel. Also, this data are forwarded to
monitoring sensing unit via GSM/GPRS modem.
Monitoring sensing unit
The monitoring sensing unit (receiving unit) is the com-
munication system for transfer of sensors data. It is the
remote monitoring device (illustrated in Fig. 5) which
consists of GSM/GPRS module to receive the data from
the quality sensing unit. These data will be fed to a
server PC via GSM modem. The obtained value will
be represented in graphical representation and it will be
stored for further reference. Also, data are compared
with the threshold values of the predefined water pa-
rameters. If the obtained value does not match, SMS will
be sent to the authorized user to take the measures in the
water quality monitoring system.
Fig. 10 Hardware
implementation of water quality
monitoring system
Page 7 of 16 556
Flow chart for water quality monitoring system
Flow chart of water quality monitoring system (Fig. 6)
has two conditions to be performed to attain the desired
results. If the observed value is equal to the threshold
value, sensed data goes to the GSM module and it will
send to the respective user. If the observed value is not
equal to the threshold value, it will go to the first step, to
get the sensor value.
Circuit diagram for water quality monitoring system
The circuit design of water quality monitoring system is
plotted in Fig. 7. The temperature sensor has three pins:
power supply pin which is connected to the Arduino board
with + 5 v, GND represents the ground pin, which is
connected to Arduino board in GND, and then the data
pin, which is known as the output pin, is connected in
Arduino board as 4th pin. The flow sensor has three pins,
power supply and ground pin connected to the Arduino
board and the data pin connected as 5th pin to the Arduino
board. The color sensor has eight pins, s0, s1, s2, s3, and
556 Page 8 of 16 Environ Monit Assess (2018) 190:556

Table 1 Temperature sensor Table 3 Turbitidy sensor

Parameters Details Parameters Details

Model LM 35 Model WQ770-B

Operating temperature range − 55 to 150 °C Maximum pressure 30 psi
Scale factor .01 V/°C Method Nephelometer with correction
Supply 60 μA Output 4–20 mA
Accuracy ± 0.4 °C (at room temperature) Operating Temperature − 10 to + 50 °C
Accuracy ± 0.8 °C range of 0 to + 100 °C

modem to verify the status of water contamination with

s4; these pins are connected as 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th pin to the help of the Arduino Uno board.
the Arduino board. LED pin is connected as 13th pin to the
Arduino board. Data pin is connected as 14th pin in the
Arduino board. Power supply and ground pin also con- Hardware implementation for water quality monitoring
nected in the Arduino board. The LCD display is connect- device in pipeline
ed in the Arduino board and then, the GSM module is also
connected with the Arduino board with the help of the Hardware implementation of the proposed system
Max232 cable. In the GSM modem, it represents two pins with required hardware is shown in Fig. 9 in the
called as TX and RX, which are connected to the Arduino water pipeline. In the pipeline, the two ends con-
board. nected with the flow sensor, to measure the running
flow of the water in Litre Per Minute (LPM). If the
observed value is lesser than the threshold value
then it indicates the leakage in the pipeline. If the
Design observed value is equal to the threshold value, it
indicates the normal flow of the water. If the ob-
Hardware setup of water monitoring device served value is greater than the threshold value, it
indicates the overflow of the water. The temperature
The hardware setup design to deploy the sensors in sensor is placed in the pipeline to measure the water
pipeline with the water quality monitoring device is temperature. If the observed temperature value is
presented in Fig. 8. The sensors are placed directly in equal to the threshold temperature then, it indicates
the pipeline, and the sensed data are sent to GSM that the normal temperature of the water. If the
observed temperature value is greater or lesser than
the threshold temperature, it indicates the hot or cold
Table 2 Flow sensor temperature of the water. The color sensor is used to
Parameters Details find whether the water is contaminated (or) not. If
the water is dirty, it will be indicated in the RGB
Model YF-S201 ratio with the range of 0–255. The steps involved in
Sensor type Hall effect the color sensor are:
Working voltage 5 to 18 V DC
(min tested working voltage 4.5 V)
a) The color sensor value is identified by the primary
Max current draw 15 mA @ 5 V
color RGB, which is a human understandable
Output type 5 V TTL
Flow rate pulse characteristics Frequency (Hz) = 7.5* Flow rate (L/min)
format.
Pulses per liter 450
b) Then, the RGB value is converted to the hex value
Durability Minimum 300,000 cycles to find the color of the water to identify which type
of the contamination is mixed in it.
Environ Monit Assess (2018) 190:556
Fig. 11 Output screenshot for temperature sensor
c) The results of the hex value are related to the color
name, which indicates the water color is contami-
nated or not.
Hardware implementation of water quality monitoring
system
The water quality monitoring system is designed using
ATmega 328 Microcontroller. Arduino code is written
in embedded C programming language using the
ARDUINO IDE1.6.5 and compiled, uploaded to the
ATmega 328 microcontroller. The water quality moni-
toring system is implemented with sensor, ATmega 328
microcontroller and GSM modem. The hardware model
deployment with water quality monitoring system is
Fig. 12 Raw water vs. filtered
water graph
Page 9 of 16 556
presented in Fig. 10. The proposed water quality mon-
itoring system device was implemented in hardware
with the help of the temperature sensor, flow sensor,
color sensor, Arduino microcontroller, Relay, Submers-
ible Motor and GSM modem. The system is designed
for easy operation, small size, lightweight, high sensi-
tivity, and low cost. The system consumes low power
and the advantage of the proposed system is to reduce
the manpower. The aim is to ensure the safe drinking
water, with the help of the GSM modem which is used
to receive the data and then, the controller unit is used to
send the sense data which is from the sensor. It shows
the result immediately; when the abnormal condition is
happened in the water distribution system, the informa-
tion is transmitted to the authenticated user by means of
the mobile phone through GSM modem then, the user
can take the action of the device. These all are viewed by
556 Page 10 of 16
Fig. 13 Water temperature graph
the central room monitoring system called SCADA
system. These systems are used to collect the data com-
ing from sensors of different stations. These results are
sent in the real time to the respective user.
Experiments
The proposed real-time monitoring device is designed
using ATmega 328 microcontroller. The code is written
for Arduino are known as sketches in embedded C.
Once the program is compiled and run, the TX and
RX LED’s in Arduino board LED flash.
Environment
The proposed system is tested at Tirunelveli City Cor-
poration (Tamilnadu, India) to monitor water
Fig. 14 Water temperature graph
for different stations
Environ Monit Assess (2018) 190:556
distribution in various water pumping stations. All sta-
tions are equipped with various sensors to monitor flow,
level, and pressure pH value and power consumption of
running pumps. The centralized SCADA server can
receive these sensors data in real time and process the
data for report generation. As part of the implementation
of our proposed system, we integrate three sensors such
as temperature, turbidity, and color sensors with the
existing SCADA. Also, these sensor values are commu-
nicated to SCADA server using GSM instead of the
satellite communication. Table 1 discusses about the
temperature sensor with different parameters. Table 2
shows the flow sensor with different parameters. Table 3
discusses about the turbitidy sensor.
Evaluation metrics The implemented system is evalu-
ated with several metrics such as time, accuracy, and
data rate. All these sensor values are live streaming to
Environ Monit Assess (2018) 190:556
Fig. 15 Flow of water in
different stations
SCADA server for immediate reporting purposes. Ac-
curacy of the sensors are evaluated with the actual
output values. Also, these sensor values are dependent
in proportion. e.g., flow and pressure sensor values are
direct proportional. Hence, it is important to measure
and evaluate the dependancy between sensor metrics.
Results
The results of temperature sensor values captured in the
android device are plotted in Fig. 11. The average water
temperature is 17 °C. If it falls below the average value,
water temperature is cold and if it is above the average
value, water temperature is hot. It also shows the output
for temperature sensor through the webpage. The mon-
itoring device makes the protected environment by set-
ting the unique IP address to authenticate the user to see
Fig. 16 RGB color ratio of water
in different stations
Page 11 of 16 556
the updated values in the monitoring device. The output
of the monitoring device displays the result in the an-
droid application. The web server updates results from
the server via GSM technology and displays the results.
Performance analysis
The comparative parameter values between raw water
and filtered water are presented in Fig. 12. Here, the
graph represents comparison between the natural water
and tap water. The graph shows the result of the raw
water which is known as the natural water and the
filtered water which is known as tap water.
The temperature of the water in raising pattern is
plotted in Fig. 13, when the water is heated. Here, the
graph represents the temperature measured by the sensor
556 Page 12 of 16
Fig. 17 Water monitoring IoT
sensors in Kurukuthurai
headworks graph
in every 5-s interval. It is measured by a LM35 temper-
ature sensor. The temperature is defined in the °C.
Temperatures of the water in different water dis-
tribution stations (usually Pump houses, Booster
stations, and Over Head Tanks) in Tirunelveli Metro
Corporation are plotted in Fig. 14. This temperature
is an average value taken at different times from the
stations.
Similarly, Fig. 15 indicates the flow sensor values in
different stations. It is useful to measure the flow of the
water during the inlet and outlet opening of the valves.
The difference between two flow sensors placed in the
both end of longer water pipeline can help to identify the
water loss and leakage.
The RGB color ratio of water based on the turbidity
values is shown in Fig. 16 in different stations. These
stations are water distribution Over Head Tanks to
Fig. 18 Comparison between
proposed and existing methods
Environ Monit Assess (2018) 190:556
supply the water by gravity. This RGB value indicates
the clarity of the water based on the reflections in the
suspended particles in the water.
There were various headworks (in which water is
pumped from the river water to sump and then to Over-
head Tank) as part of the water distribution pipeline of
the city. These are the source of bringing the river water
to the citizens. Fig. 17 shows the water monitoring IoT
system in Kurukuthurai headwork station. The graph
shows that the water monitoring sensor values taken in
the continuous manner in the Kurukuthurai headworks.
Here, the graph shows the time vs. range, which
depicted the water monitor continuously by every hour
in the headworks. As the values are taken in real time
with the running water of river flow, it varies at different
times of the day. The cumulative flow for the day gives
the MLD supplied from the specific station.
Environ Monit Assess (2018) 190:556 Page 13 of 16 556

Table 4 Comparative analysis

No Criteria Existing methods Proposed work

1 Sensors pH, conductivity, dissolved oxygen is only dealt Temperature, turbidity and color sensors
(Pranata et al. 2017; Lin et al. 2017; Ramesh et al. 2017)
2 Micro controller Microcontroller not integrated with IoT (Ebere and Francisca 2013) Arduino Uno integrated with IoT
3 Communication ZigBee (Satish and Amruta 2013, Wifi (Kamaludin et al. 2017) GPRS with 4G Volte
GSM/GPRS (Zhenan et al. 2013)
4 SCADA server Local area network (LAN)/satellite-based transfer of data Web/mobile-based transfer of data
(Asalmol et al. 2017; Zhenan et al. 2013)
5 Speed Relatively low (Satish and Amruta 2013; Lambrou et al. 2014) High speed networks
6 SCADA platform Proprietary (Zakaria and Michael 2017; Riis 2016) Open-source platforms

The comparison between the proposed and existing
SCADA monitoring system (Stoian et al. 2016) is
shown in Fig. 18. It is derived that proposed IoT system
outperforms the existing in terms of sensors, communi-
cation, and technology.
Table 4 represents different metrics between the pro-
posed system and the existing ones in (Zhenan et al.
2013; Lambrou et al. 2014; Stoian et al. 2016; Asalmol
et al. 2017; Parameswari and Balasingh 2018a). The
proposed method accelerates the existing works in the
following ways:
a) Satellite-based communication is replaced with
GPRS-based communication. Availability of 4G/
5G with high-data rate speed greatly helps the com-
munication overhead and importantly the network
speed.
b) Integrated sensor with the help of IoT is de-
ployed to analyze the accuracy of data in real
time. As these sensors are part of IoT networks,
they can share data among different water dis-
tribution stations in the city.
c) Reports are immediately available to operators in
each station to take the decisions, which is the
primary advantage of SCADA system.
d) New sensors can be easily added in the proposed
IoT SCADA network, which increases scalability
and reliability.
The minimum and maximum ranges supported by
the different communication modules are shown in
Fig. 19. The graph represents different modules com-
pared to different GSM communication modules.
Sum up the advantage of the proposed system:
Sensors: Existing sensors are computational inten-
sive and not connected to IoT network. They act as
standalone sensor devices. The proposed IoT-based
system has the capability to off-loading the compu-
tation in the cloud, thus make them thin devices and
part of sensor nodes.
Microcontroller: Most of the SCADA systems are
made with PLC controller. Now the proposed

Fig. 19 Range vs.

communication module
556 Page 14 of 16
system is built with Arduino Uno microprocessor,
which accelerates the speed of the SCADA system.
Communication: Instead of using satellite/GSM
communication, here, we implemented dual GSM/
GPRS model. Based on the network availability in
the remote stations, RTU can choose either GSM or
GPRS networks.
Conclusion
In this paper, we propose a new SCADA system that
integrates with the IoT technology for real-time water
quality monitoring. Physical parameter such as temper-
ature, turbidity, and color were added to the system. This
real-time application generates, collects, transfers, and
stores sensor data in the web server by using the GSM
module. Data analysis was done, and instant reports
were generated to display from anywhere and anytime
in the web browser. This system was designed to reduce
manpower, lower cost, and increase efficiency in water
distribution and monitoring. Experiments affirm the
good performance of the proposed system.
In the future, we consider real-time data analytics
using competent algorithms of the ON/OFF capability
in water distribution stations. Besides, it is necessary to
prevent intrusion to sensor data communication over
wireless networks (Kapoor et al. 2018a, b, c; Singh
et al. 2018; Son et al. 2018b; Tam et al. 2018). Mini-
mizing energy consumption of sensors with low power
is also challenging in SCADA system, which operates
24/7 in industries. Applications to other domains (Ali
et al. 2017, 2018a, b; Chuan et al. 2018; Giap et al.
2018; Hemanth et al. 2018a, b; Khan et al. 2018; Louati
et al. 2018; Ngan et al. 2018a, b; Nguyen et al. 2017;
Pham et al. 2018; Son et al. 2018a, b; Son and Fujita
2018; Tuan et al. 2018; Tuong et al. 2018) will be our
target.
Funding information This project work is supported by the
consultancy project SCADA Roc.No.E1/9912/2007 dated
24.5.17 from Tirunelveli Corporation, Tamilnadu, India.
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