PIPENET

A Wireless Sensor Network for Pipeline Monitoring

Ivan Stoianov Lama Nachman Sam Madden, Timur Tokmouline

Imperial College, London Intel Research MIT CSAIL

-Anandatirtha
 Motivation
US water companies are under increasing pressure to improve the
management of their ageing assets and optimize operational and
capital expenditure.
Transmission and distribution projects represent the largest
component ($184 billion).
The threat of contaminant intrusion due to leaking pipes or
malicious human action will further increase the projected
expenditure.
Need to identify critical areas.
Failures such as water leaks lead to dire consequences including
loss of life, severe interruptions in service, degraded fire fighting
ability, damage to infrastructure, and multi-million dollar repair
bills.
 PIPENET offers :-
Detect, localize, quantify bursts and leaks, detect
blockages and detect malfunctioning of equipment
such as control valves.
Monitor quality of water transmission.
Monitor water level in sewer collectors.
 Known issues
Pipelines are subject to complex, highly non-linear
temporal and spatial processes that make it difficult to
differentiate between faults and stochastic system
behaviors.
This makes detecting failures a challenging task.
 PIPENET Working and Design
Integrate and correlate data from several sources.
Type of data monitored are acoustic/vibration signals,
velocity (flow) signals, and pressure transient signals.
Acoustic/vibration signals are used for detecting small
leaks.
Analysis of pressure transients and velocity (flow)
enables prompt detection and localization of larger
leaks and malfunctioning equipment such as air
valves.
PipeNet Deployment.
 Sensor Architecture
Intel Mote Sensor Node
Consists of an ARM7 core, 64kB RAM, 512kB Flash and
Bluetooth radio.
sensor board designed to interface the Intel Mote to
various analog sensors used in PipeNet.
The sensor board supports up to 8 analog channels.
 Other design parameters
Bluetooth scatternet formation and a tree routing
algorithms to enable self configuring, self healing
networks.
Lightweight reliable transport protocol to support
fragmentation and assembly of large data packets, as
PipeNet motes frequently need to transfer messages of
up to 100 kB.
Data Collection
 Data Analysis
Data from sensors is relayed via a GPRS modem to a
backend server.
Data from each sensor is loaded to a database.
Data from sensors is analyzed.
Possible integration with other applications like
Google Maps, Web server etc are also possible.
 Design Challenges
Resilience to harsh environmental conditions.
Separating data collection from communication.
Time synchronization.