Approach

The project objectives will be achieved through the following approach:

• A requirements analysis for a generic water monitoring application will be done, accounting for the processes to be monitored in estuarine and coastal regions, one of the most complex environments in water bodies.
• WSN requirements will then be produced, accounting for different characteristics of distinct water bodies and listing all physical constraints.
• A selection of WSN nodes will be made, based on characteristics such as power management, cryptographic support and channel selection. Besides considering 802.15.4 (ZigBee) as the communication technology, AQUAMON will also look at other existing WSN communication technologies at the time of project development.
• The selected devices will be tested for quality and reliability evaluation in a set of real scenarios, covering a diversity of possible operational conditions. The results will provide guidance on the best options for each considered scenario.
• Communication protocols will be developed with the aim to provide real-time and more predictable communication services, exploiting characteristics of the link layer such as bounded omission degree.
• The resulting communication subsystem will be used by the data collection and processing platform, to gather sensor data in a dependable way.
• AQUAMON will define a framework for dependable data processing, providing the means to assess and enhance the quality of sensor data from an aquatic WSN. The detection of faults affecting sensor data and the correction of data errors will be done through the employment of inference techniques based on data series and data fusion procedures, also combining data processing techniques and model-based redundancy schemes (using “virtual sensors”), to achieve more accurate data and improved awareness about the effective data quality.
• The communication and the data processing solutions will be integrated in a coherent and reliable aquatic monitoring platform.
• The platform will be evaluated in real water conditions, in the Bay of Seixal. The evaluation procedure will entail the combination of the existing LNEC’s real-time monitoring network (Alcântara and Parque das Nações stations) and other publicly available online data (e.g. Cascais and VTS tidal gauges), with new monitoring stations, deployed in the context of AQUAMON, and the forecast models already in operation.
• The results of AQUAMON will be disseminated in the scientific community (through journal papers and conference presentations) and to coastal managers (through meetings).