Abstract—A common challenge in the implementation of Internet of Things (IOT) Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is that the sensor nodes are known to be power hungry devices. The energy stored in the batteries which power up these sensor nodes deplete quickly especially when more data is transmitted to the cloud or when multiple sensors are attached to a single sensor node. In the context of flood and environmental monitoring, increasing the number of sensor nodes in a Wireless Sensor Network is desirable in order to increase the spatial resolution of the data and hence achieve better representation about rising water levels and overall water quality in a particular city. However, having more sensor nodes in a Wireless Sensor Network results in more challenges for the power supply management of the overall Wireless Sensor Network. A drawback of the sensor nodes which are usually powered by Lithium Ion batteries is that there is a limited number of cycles in which a battery can be charged and discharged before the battery is considered to be fully degraded and therefore methods which can lengthen the duration of each charging and discharging cycle will be useful to increase the overall battery longevity. In this paper, a method which combines solar energy harvesting together with a fuzzy logic based algorithm for adaptive sampling is proposed in order to achieve a continuous source of energy for the sensor nodes and also increase the duration between each charging and discharging cycle resulting in batteries which can last for a longer duration. The developed sensor nodes have been deployed to measure river water levels and dissolved oxygen.
 

Index Terms—Flood monitoring, internet of things, LoRa, lithium ion batteries, wireless sensor networks, dissolved oxygen

Cite: Mohd Aizat Mohd Yazid, Ahmad Jazlan, Mohd Zuhaili Mohd Rodzi, Muhammad Afif Husman, and Abdul Rahman Afif, "A Method for Preserving Battery Life in Wireless Sensor Nodes for LoRa Based IOT Flood Monitoring," Journal of Communications vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 230-238, April 2022. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.17.4.230-238