Drinking Water Engineering and Science Discussions www.drink-water-eng-sci-discuss.net 1996-9473 1996-9481 3 1 2010 10.5194/dwesd-3-149-2010 http://www.drink-water-eng-sci-discuss.net/3/149/2010/ http://www.drink-water-eng-sci-discuss.net/3/149/2010/dwesd-3-149-2010.html http://www.drink-water-eng-sci-discuss.net/3/149/2010/dwesd-3-149-2010.pdf 149 175 2010-04-12 Understanding and managing large sensor networks D. D. Ediriweera damjee@gmail.com I. W. Marshall Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YQ, UK The water supply industry is trialing a range of sensor network designs for monitoring distributed infrastructure. The paper investigates the performance of such a sensor system deployed to monitor a water distribution network. The study reveals up to one fifth of the data intended to be collected either to be missing or erroneous. Findings reinforce the importance of in-depth design consideration of all aspects of large scale sensor systems, and the necessity for expertise on every detail of the system, or access to a rule set which embeds this knowledge allowing non-specialists to make near optimal choices. First steps towards defining such a rule set is presented here with supporting evidence. Cerpa, A., Elson, J., Estrin, D., Girod, L., Hamilton, M., and Zhao, J.: Habitat monitoring: application driver for wireless communication technology, Proceedings of the ACM Sigcomm Workshop on Data Communication, 20–41, 2001. Krishnamurthy, L., Adler, R., Buonadonna, P., Chhabra, J., Flanigan, M., Kushalnagar, N., Nachman, L., and Yarvis, M.: Design and deployment of industrial sensor networks: experiences from a semiconductor plant and the north sea, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, 64–75, 2005. Nikoletseas, S. and Spirakis, P.: Efficient sensor network design for continuous monitoring of moving objects, Theor. Comput. Sci., 402, 1, 56–66, 2008. Stoianov, I., Nachman, L., Madden, S., and Tokmouline, T.: PIPENETa wireless sensor network for pipeline monitoring, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information processing in sensor networks, 264–273, 2007. Szewczyk, R., Mainwaring, A., Polastre, J., Anderson, J., and Culler, D.: An analysis of a large scale habitat monitoring application, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, 214–226, 2004. Tierney, B., Crowley, B., Gunter, D., Lee, J., and Thompson, M.: A Monitoring Sensor Management System for Grid Environments, Cluster Comput., 4, 1, 19–28, 2001.