Leveraging the internet of things for smart waters: Motivation, enabling technologies and deployment strategies for Pakistan

With a continuous strive to develop smarter and more integrated systems, the Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving into a well-established and widely-adopted technology, nurturing many success stories and promises to deliver. The IoT systems foster digital-physical integrations, thus offering many innovative use-case scenarios for smarter communities by facilitating efficient management and intelligent conservation of physical resources. Water is one of such precious and rapidly depleting resources, which can be effectively managed through the adoption of IoT. This is even more important for countries like Pakistan, having an exponentially growing population and an agro-based economy. This paper aims to provide an insight regarding smart management of water distribution, consumption and quality monitoring for Pakistan, using the Internet of Things as its prime enabler. Besides presenting the state-of-the-art and a critical analysis of enabling technologies, a key contribution of our work is to propose a use-case driven IoT deployment strategy, suiting the infrastructure and requirements of existing water distribution systems, both for the rural and urban sectors of Pakistan.