Early Flood Warning System based on ARM Cortex M3, WSN

and GSM
Abstract
Flooding is the one of the most common natural hazards in India and causes significant and
irretrievable damage to life and property. The magnitude of the losses caused by the recent hurricanes
underscore the limitations of current flood-detection and prediction systems. Current systems are based
primarily on satellite and microwave imaging techniques, which are expensive, can be inconsistent and
hazardous, and need complex algorithms to incorporate the effects of noise and wind. Other systems use
ultrasonic, electromagnetic, chemical, and radiation sensors for flood prediction, which are prone to
interference from phenomena such as temperature fluctuations, humidity, and electromagnetic noise.
This project implements a system that predicts an oncoming flood situation based on wireless
network of piezoelectric pressure sensors. Pressure sensors are able to measure the river water level
accurately and they are cheaper than currently used ultrasonic sensors. The flood prediction system
consists of two sensor nodes, one base node, and any number of base stations. The two sensor nodes and
the base node are deployed miles away from the limits of the city of interest. A sensor node measures the
rising river water level and transmits this data to the base node. Second sensor node is used to ensure that
correct data can be determined by voting even if one node collects erroneous information. The
base node processes the data received from the sensor nodes and the final flood parameter is categorized
into alert levels and transmitted to the base station located in an appropriate emergency management
office in the city. The base node is equipped with GSM module for this purpose. It can be configured to
send multiple SMS to several base stations. All the sensor nodes runs on battery power while the base
node needs mains supply. The sensor nodes and base node is built around WPAN technology based on
IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. The base node acts as the coordinator and the network is constructed using star
topology. A low power microcontroller runs the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol stack and RF transceiver handles
the data packets. This makes the system low cost, low power, reliable, autonomous and easy to install.
The flood prediction system described in this project is capable of predicting floods before they
occur. Predicting the flood before its actual occurrence can buy sufficient time for residents to
evacuate nearby areas, preventing loss of life. The microcontroller chosen is based on ARM Cortex M3
architecture. ARM Cortex M3 is the next generation high performance 32-bit ARM core developed
specifically for microcontroller applications with thumb-2 technology based on ARMv7-M architecture.