2015 IEEE Conference on Wireless Sensors
On the Application of IoT: Monitoring of Troughs
Water Level Using WSN
1
Lukas, 2Wisena Aditya Tanumihardja, 2Edy Gunawan,
1
Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Katolik Indonesia Atma Jaya, Jakarta, Indonesia
2,3
Red Diamond Laboratories, BSD City, Tangerang, Indonesia
1
lukas@atmajaya.ac.id, 2wisena.aditya@gmail.com, 3edy@potensi.net
Abstract—The need of monitoring the water level of troughs is
increasing. This is parallel with the growing of Wireless Sensor
Network and Internet of Thing. By combining both approach,
cattlemen can monitoring their troughs ubiquitous using their
own personal device. This paper develop such system by using
LoRa™ as the media between sensor hub and nodes, while
Raspberry Pi is used as the gateway to push data into server. We
have successfully tested the functionality of node to hub join
mechanism, where a node should join to the closest hub, which
marked by the highest RSSI of beacon signal. The designed
system is able to wirelessly sense trough water level up to 50
simulated nodes.
Keywords—Wireless Sensor Network; Internet of Thing;
LoRa™; RFM95; ATMEGA; Raspberry Pi
I. INTRODUCTION
In the era of wireless technology, wireless sensor network
(WSN) has become an alternative to reach a remote area or an
area that require no cable in it. Compared to the wiring method,
wireless is cheaper, since it is free of cable maintenance,
flexible in installation, and also reliable. Many WSN
applications have been developed such in the farm, to monitor
the environment conditions [1], even an early detection of
avian influenza in poultry farm [2]. Along with the wireless
era, the Internet of Things (IoT) has rapidly growing with its
principal to bring any devices or things are ubiquitous
connected with any desktops or portable devices [3].
As an application among the others, that combine the WSN
and IoT, our group has developed a system to help the
livestock productivity by monitoring the water level in a
trough. Although there are troughs that have auto refill system,
but monitoring the quantity of the water in troughs have not
been implemented. In some cases, the auto refill were failed to
fill the trough and caused water underflow, or others were
failed to stop refill the trough which caused water overflow.
Designing trough monitoring system has several aspects
that need to be considered. Most of the troughs are placed
inside the barn which not provided with electricity. Therefore,
the system has to be battery operated. On the other hand, high
transmission power is needed since the distance between
central hub and the barn has more than 2 km. Further, when
there are several barns and each barn has many troughs, the air
traffic communication will be crowded, causing the data
transaction to be failed.
978-1-4673-9398-0/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE
This paper has the following structure: Section II reviews
the existing work on wireless sensor network in the farm. The
design and implementation of the system are discussed in
Section III. Section IV discusses the results of the experiments.
Finally, Section V concludes the paper.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
In [1], wireless sensor network was used to help farmer
monitor their surrounding environment such as humidity,
temperature, and also movement of animals. These data are
transmitted to the central hub using wireless ZigBee that had
center frequency 2.4GHz. For the main controller they used
Microchip PIC24F16KA102 that capable to read analog data
that produced by the sensors. This system was also claimed to
reach 1.5 km maximum at 2.4GHz ISM band.
In [2], nRF24L01 was used to transmit the axis data of a
chicken movement and the body temperature for avian
influenza surveillance. The device itself was attached on the
chicken, thus it should be battery operated. Along with
microcontroller C8051F411 that operated with button battery,
which may operate up to 2 year monitoring without
replacement.
Paper [4] discussed the Long Range (LoRa™) technology
that was developed by semiconductor manufacturer, Semtech.
It is shown that the spread spectrum modulation that utilized
broadband linear frequency modulated in LoRa™, can reach
up to 6.6 km with Packet Error Rate 7.3% at 838MHz of
center frequency.
III. METHODOLOGY
A. Topology
The basic idea of IoT is every node connected to the
internet. However, in our system, the nodes is not directly
connected to the internet, or could be explained that the nodes
should use a gateway to connect to the internet. The reason
behind this design, is based on the low power consumption
requirement, since each of the node will be placed on the field,
where no electricity can be plugged, thus it requires battery
operated. As for the gateway itself, it will be placed up on the
roof of cattlemans’ house, where it can use the power line to
operate.
Since the low power consumption of each node is
emphasized in this system, thus we chose the star topology as a
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default communication topology between the hub and nodes. In
this paper, the hub refer to sensor hub, where it collects all
sensors’ data from nodes, and a node is refer to the device that
is placed at the trough to sense the water level inside the
trough. The data from nodes, will then be send to the server
trough gateway, where in the next section we will explain more
about the design of the gateway, sensor hub, and nodes further.
B. Design
On the field, the nearest distance between cattleman’s
house and the barns is around 1 km and the furthest is 3 km.
There is also consideration that the elevation difference
between hub and nodes will affect the transmission, where
most of the nodes, will be placed near to the ground due to the
height of the trough is less than 50 cm, where the hub’s
antenna will be placed above the cattleman’s house which
could be 8 meter high from the ground. With regard to this
requirement and also due to the free frequency that can be use
on the application’s country, our preliminary design of the
system is to use the LoRa™ with 915 MHz center frequency.
The alternative product of LoRa™, HopeRF RFM95 [5] is
used in this system. As the controller in the node side we use
Atmel ATmega328 [6] to read the water condition in the trough
which we use the float switch GE-1307 [7]. As for the sensor
hub, we use Raspberry Pi 1 model B with 512MB of random
access memory (RAM). ATmega is chosen for the nodes to
satisfy the low power system for remote area purpose, while
the choice of Raspberry Pi as the controller for the hub is based
on the system on chip and complete embedded system that has
SPI to communicate with HopeRF RFM95.
Server
TCP/IP
Gateway
Since the target user of this system are the cattleman who is
expected to have minimum engineering background, thus the
whole system needs to be automatically self-configured. At the
beginning, the sensor hub will broadcast a beacon to the air.
Meanwhile, the nodes will be scanning for surrounding
beacons. As the node detect and find the highest Received
Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) from the node side, it will join
to that beacon. Once the node sends a request join packet to the
desired hub, it then will receive a reply of its logical address
from the hub. In unresponsive request from the node with
duration over 30 minutes, the hub will mark the node with non-
active status.
TABLE I. TROUGH CONDITION REPRESENTED BY THE STATUS OF FLOAT
SWITCHES
Float Switch Upper Float Switch Lower Condition
1 1 Full
0 1 Normal
0 0 Empty
Then, within an hour of nonactivity, the hub will discard the
node from its list. To resume the connection, the node should
repeat the request join procedure again.
In a regular condition, all the nodes will send periodic data
which inform the water level status of the troughs, where it is
categorized into three conditions: underflow, normal, and
overflow. This category is designed to satisfy the number of
data that has to be transmitted which influence the power
consumption per transmission. As a limitation, in this paper,
the data confidentiality has not been considered yet. However,
the data integrity check by using CRC method is on the list of
our system’s feature, since it has been implemented in the
packet structure for LoRa™.

Sensor Hub Gateway

Node Controller
(Raspberry Pi
(ATMEGA 328)
LoRaTM v.1 type B)
915 MHz
SPI SPI
Node Node Node
1 2 n Sensor Hub Node
Transmitter Transmitter
(HopeRF RFM95) (HopeRF RFM95)
Fig. 1. Topology of trough water level monitoring system
(a) (b)

To display the status of troughs it uses HDMI port, while the Fig. 2. Connection diagram of trough water level monitoring
3.5mm jacks can be used as output to an alarm system through system, (a) Hub and (b) Node
active speaker, and ethernet port as a gateway physical device.
The overall system diagram can be seen in the Fig. 2. For the
sensor itself there are two float switches which placed as
shown in the Fig. 3. These two switches will mark three
conditions of the water level in trough as shown in Table I.

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IV. RESULT AND DISCUSSION
A. Functional test in the Laboratory
As described in the Sec. I, a float switch will be placed
inside each trough to measure the water level in the trough,
which is still simulated in our experiments. In the first test, we
gather a node and two sensor hubs on a table with the
following order: first hub --- second hub --- sensor node, which
is illustrated in Fig. 4. We then powered on the hubs and node.
Once the hub is active, it then spreads a beacon and node will
keep listening other beacons for over 1 minute. This 1 minute
period was sufficient in the lab condition but it still needs to be
adjusted in the field. From the node log data that were captured,
it showed that 2 beacons were appeared. The first beacon had
RSSI of -24dBm and marked with unique ID “Hub 1”. The
second beacon had RSSI of -17 dBm and marked with a
Float Switch Upper
We were also looking for the behavior of the system, that have
caused the nodes failed to join or sending the data. The
experiment showed that, by increasing the number of nodes, it
will also increase the collision inside the whole monitoring
systems. In our experiments we simulated 100 nodes present in
the system using 5 physical nodes, by increasing the number of
data sending per period. In the normal condition, the node will
sleep for 10 minutes before it sends the next data.
In the condition where heavy traffic occurred in the
transmission line, the hub would not be able to give an
acknowledgement to the node either node's join request or
node's periodic data. Although each node is able to listen to the
air traffic being used or not, but two nodes would have been
waiting and finally decide to send data at the same time when
they saw that air traffic is none. In Table III the result of packet
error with simulated nodes is presented, along with several
numbers of nodes. In the experiment we used 26 bytes of
payload length, and each node was set to send 100 packets with
sending interval n second, where n was set by dividing the
normal sleep time with number of nodes. The experiment was
repeated 50 times and shown in the Table III as the mean of
valid packet.

TABLE II. FLOAT SWITCHES LAB TEST RESULTS WITH DISTANCE 50 CM

Float Switch Bottom Float Switch Float Switch Data at Sensor

Data at Sensor Hub
Upper Lower Node

1 1 OF OF

0 1 NE NE
Trough
0 0 E E

Fig. 3. Placement diagram of float switches inside a trough 1 0 ERR ERR

unique ID “Hub2”. This RSSI results indicate that the longer TABLE III. RESULT OF COMMUNICATION ERROR IN HUB SIDE CAUSE BY
distance will increase the loss of signal power during HEAVY TRAFFIC
transmission.
Number of Periodic Data Number of Packet Valid 26 bytes
As the node trying to connect to one of the sensor hubs, it Nodes Interval (s) Received Packet
showed that Hub 2 was chosen since it had a bigger RSSI. We
5 600 100 100
then manually controlled the float switches to simulate the
possible conditions. The result is shown by the Table II, where 10 300 100 100
we also compared the data that was read by the node from the 25 120 100 99
float switch and the data that transmitted from node to the hub. 50 60 100 100
The notation of “OF” stands for “overflow” status, “NE” stands
for “not empty”, “E” stands for “empty”, and “ERR” stands for 75 40 100 91
“error”. The error condition might not be appear in the real 100 30 100 83
condition except there was a hardware problem, which is why
we named it as “ERR”.
B. Field Test
As we mentioned in the Sec. III, that most of the nodes
Hub Hub will be placed close to the ground with approximated height is
Node less than 50 cm. Therefore in this test, we analyze the behavior
1 2
of the transmission between hub and node that has different
50 cm 50 cm elevation. In the test, we also analyze the distance between
hub and node as a comparison to the vertical position. On the
Fig. 4. Functionality test between one sensor node and two sensor hubs other hand, to maximize the transmission, we analyze the
antenna polarization difference between the horizontal and
vertical.

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TABLE IV. THE RSSI OF NODES’ LINK WITH ELEVATION AND ANTENNA POLARIZATION DIFFERENCE

Hub Elevation (m) Node Elevation (m) Distance (km) Polarization RSSI (dbm)
Horizontal -101
0.5
Vertical -103
Horizontal -103
1
Vertical Lost
Horizontal -103
0.4 1.5
Vertical Lost
Horizontal -103
2.2
Vertical Lost
Horzontal Lost
2.7
Vertical Lost
2.5
Horizontal -97
0.5
Vertical -98
Horizontal -101
1
Vertical -100
Horizontal -101
6 1.5
Vertical -102
Horizontal -96
2.2
Vertical -98
Horizontal -103
2.7
Vertical -103
Horizontal Lost
0.5
Vertical Lost
Horizontal Lost
1
Vertical Lost
Horizontal Lost
0.4 1.5
Vertical Lost
Horizontal Lost
2.2
Vertical Lost
Horizontal Lost
2.7
Vertical Lost
8
Horizontal -96
0.5
Vertical -98
Horizontal -100
1
Vertical -101
Horizontal -100
6 1.5
Vertical -102
Horizontal -103
2.2
Vertical -103
Horizontal -103
2.7
Vertical -104

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 2015 IEEE Conference on Wireless Sensors
As the results, which are shown in Table IV, the smaller
difference between hub and node elevation will affect the
succcessful rate of transmission, which in our case indicated
by the RSSI, with dbm as the unit. These results, confirm our
hypothesis about the transmission behavior if the elevation
difference between hub and node is large. It indicates in our
results as Lost in packet transmission. The best result that we
can achieved, when the node is 6m high above the ground and
the hub is place 8m high above the ground. Also based on our
test results, although when the node is place 0.4m above the
ground and the hub 2.5m above the ground, the result is
beyond with the node that place 6 meter above the ground. We
conclude that the closer our device is placed to the ground,
will affect the transmission quality, which tend to be poor. On
the other hand, based on field experiment’s results which also
shown in Table IV, the antenna polarization is also affect the
link quality in the close distance between hub and node (we
refer the close distance as hub and node difference ≤ 1.5m).
Finally, in our analysis, the best antenna polarization for our
application is the horizontal one. But the effect of antenna
polarization might be different in other environment.
V. CONCLUSION
The wireless sensor network provides a great solution to
minimize the wired communication which costs a lot when two
devices are located far apart. On the other hand, IoT is a
promising solution to communicate between devices or
between device and user not only in local area but in the wider
area that has internet coverage. In this paper, we have applied
wireless sensor network and IoT to monitoring water level of
troughs, thus cattleman can remotely observe their livestock.
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During the laboratory test, the basic mechanism has been
successfully implemented that marked with successful
transaction between hub and nodes, which include node joining
to hub and periodic sensor data by node. However, some
mechanisms need to be improved in this system such as the air
traffic when a hub has to handle more than a hundred of nodes.
Based on our field test, the bigger elevation difference between
hub and node, could result in a bad transmission quality.
However, this could be overcome by lowering the hubs’
antenna or higher-up the nodes’ antenna which reduce the
elevation difference between hub and node. Field experiments
also showed that, it will be best to use horizontal antenna
polarization for our application.
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