An IoT-Based Complete Smart Drainage System for

a Smart City
Tarannum Zaki1 , Ismat Tarik Jahan1 , Md Shohrab Hossain2 , Husnu S. Narman3
1 Department
of CSE, Military Institute of Science and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh
2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh
3 Weisberg Division of Computer Science, Marshall University, Huntington, WV, USA

Email: tarannumzaki44@gmail.com, ismat.mou@gmail.com, mshohrabhossain@cse.buet.ac.bd, narman@marshall.edu

Abstract—With the technological advancements, every appli- to provide clean and hygienic environment to improve quality
cation from our day to day life is becoming Internet-oriented, of life [3]. As the urban areas are expanding gradually, the
leading to the concept of Internet of Things (IoT). Various IoT need for industrial, organizational, and domestic structures are
devices and applications can be combined together for making a
Smart City where smart drainage system is essential. However, also increasing day by day. As a result, the flow of such excess
solid wastes from groundwater flowing through the drainage surface water is also increasing, and the necessity for effective
system can create significant obstruction to its unrestricted flow, management of the drainage system is on the rise in urban
thereby causing overflows and profound environmental pollution. areas. Generally, the groundwater flows through the drainage
Thus, it is essential to manage these solid wastes effectively so system towards a wastewater treatment plant to discard all
that they do not obstruct the way of the drainage system. There
have been few isolated works focusing on underground drainage impurities and pollutants [4]. Often solid wastes (e.g., plastic,
monitoring or drainage system management only. However, there biodegradable materials, metals, etc.) from the groundwater
has not been any work that focused on both the underground create blockage inside the drainage pipeline systems, thereby
drainage mechanism and the ground surface waste management contaminating water from the drainage pipes. Therefore, it is
system. In this paper, we have aimed at solving the particular evident that solid wastes from groundwater flowing through
reason that causes overflow and to manage that cause efficiently.
We have proposed a detailed IoT based drainage management the drainage system can create a major obstacle to its unre-
system that also incorporates drainage waste management to stricted flow, thereby causing profound environmental impact.
make the system more effective. We have clearly specified the Thus, it is essential to manage these solid wastes effectively
methods for preventing and managing the solid wastes that are so that they do not obstruct the natural flow of the drainage
responsible for creating blockage inside drainage pipelines and system.
drain covers.
Considering the circumstances, it is apparent that the need
Keywords— IoT, Smart City, WSN, biodegradable, proto-
for a drainage management system along with its waste
cols, sensors.
management system in urban areas is inevitable, especially in
a under-developed countries. Manually handling these systems
I. I NTRODUCTION
is often time-consuming and requires too much effort (human
One of the most remarkable technological innovations of labor to collect waste that creates obstruction in the drainage
modern science is the Internet of Things, which refers to an in- system). Hence, the concept of IoT can be applied to automate
terconnected network among various physical objects/devices. such systems and consider them as components of Smart City.
IoT collects/exchanges data from the interconnected physical Therefore, our aim in this paper is to propose an effective
objects and performs specific tasks based on some specific smart drain management system.
analysis [1]. Currently, IoT based applications are widely used There have been few research works regarding the drainage
in household activities, organizational activities, transporta- management systems using the concept of IoT. There are
tion, health care, agriculture, construction, etc. [2], all of which individual solutions for waste management system [5]–[8],
introduce the concept of Smart City. Smart City can be defined underground drainage pipelines [9] and manhole monitoring
as the electronic infrastructure of an urban area combined system [10], wastewater treatment or recycling system [11].
with various device/physical objects which are used to collect There are many solutions regarding drainage systems that
data in order to utilize it to manage different resources of a mainly concerns the aspect that how a drainage system is
city efficiently and establish a significant connection between managed [5], [6], [11] if any overflow occurs, without solving
the urban community and urban infrastructure [1]. Smart the root cause of overflow. Moreover, there have few works
City is intended to provide a healthy, secure, and sustainable that dealt with smart waste management [7], [8], which can
environment and infrastructure for the welfare of every citizen. only manage ground surface wastage. Other works focused
One of the essential parts of a sustainable environment is on systems for underground drainage monitoring only. There
a healthy drainage system where the excess surface water has not been any work that focused on both the underground
is being removed from an area and managed naturally or drainage mechanism and the ground surface waste manage-
artificially in order to prevent the area from being flooded and ment system. Here lies the novelty of our proposed system.
We have aimed at solving the particular reason that caused to detect the level of trash in the dustbin, and the presence
overflow and to manage that cause efficiently. of toxic gas can also be detected. Anotehr waste detection
The contributions of this paper are (i) proposing an compre- system was introduced with four subsystems [7] which are
hensive smart solution for both surface drainage mechanism Smart Trash System, Vehicle System, Local Base Station and
and waste management system, (ii) detailing the crucial com- Smart Monitoring, and Controlling Hut. Ultrasonic sensors,
ponents of the proposed system, (iii) specifying the methods load sensors, and ZigBee protocols are used in this system.
for preventing and managing the solid wastes that are respon- Through load sensors, the load and level of trash are detected,
sible for creating blockage inside drainage pipelines and drain and the information is transmitted a high-level signal through
covers. ZigBee to the controlling hut and from there to the vehicle,
We have illustrated our proposed smart drainage system in which will go to that place to clean trash.
details. We have emphasized that if the root cause for drain However, most of the works regarding automated drainage
clogging can be solved, the city can be protected against the management systems have been focusing on individual prob-
consequences of environment pollution. lems, and drainage waste management has been hardly taken
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. A brief into consideration. This paper has proposed a system design
overview of some related works regarding IoT, Smart City, that conjointly considers smart drainage mechanism for in-
drainage, and waste management system using IoT have been frastructures and roadside drains as well as adequate drainage
depicted in Section II. Next, the conceptual features and waste management has also been taken into account.
system architecture and the technical details of the proposed
III. P ROPOSED S YSTEM
system design have been described elaborately in Section III.
The work-flow of the system is also illustrated in this Section The proposed system design has been classified into two
IV. Finally, the system’s limitations and future work have parts: conceptual features - presenting the main features of
been presented, followed by some concluding remarks and the system design and system architecture - presenting a
references. detailed description of the entire system architecture and its
components along with the technical details.
II. R ELATED W ORKS
A short description is provided in this section on different
related research works and development that was performed
by the research community..
Lazarescu [12] presented the tiered structure of a WSN
(Wireless Sensor Network) platform and how it is functionally
designed and implemented in the field of IoT based environ-
mental monitoring applications. An urban IoT architecture,
along with the concept and services of Smart City and some
practical IoT based guidelines accepted for Padova Smart City
Project in Italy, was discussed by Zanella et al. [13].
An application of a cost-effective automated drainage man-
agement system was studied in [9] concerning how drain clogs
could be detected in the sewage pipelines using acoustic sen- Fig. 1: Flow diagram for system architecture.
sors and also providing communication with a server through
the WSN platform so that immediate actions can be taken.
SK and Rao [10] presented the design and implementation of A. Conceptual Features
an IoT based smart manhole monitoring system using IoT that The target feature of this system design is to prevent the
will generate an alarm based on the status of the manhole (i.e., clogging of drains using the concept of IoT so that it does
open lid, overflow, overpressure, etc.). not lead to drainage overflow and further inconvenience. In
For the waste management system, some significant works order to achieve this feature, it is required to consider all
were performed based on RFID technology, such as a smart types of sources (home, industry, roadside drains, etc.) and
bin for proper disposal and recycling of products [5] and a real- their drainage mechanisms. Different infrastructure such as
time multi-layered architecture for a waste management sys- apartment, industry might have separate drainage mechanisms.
tem [6] that can track stolen waste bin and identify weight and On the other hand, roadside drains might have another type
types of waste . Huang et al. [11] introduced a new approach of drainage mechanism. Thus, it is important to integrate all
for recognizing multi-featured objects using optical sensor- types of drainage mechanisms of different sources to apply
based technology for processing solid wastes. Anuradha et the target feature. The target feature leads to some additional
al. [8] found out an easy way to monitor dustbins by using features inferring from the causes of drain clogging. Drain
a unique ID where all dustbins are interconnected through clogging often occurs due to blockage of different materials
an Android App which sends a message to the concerned (plastic, paper, biodegradable products, etc.) inside drainage
people when the bins are full. Ultrasonic sensors are used pipelines and over drain covers due to natural or human-made
occurrences. These materials should be managed efficiently receives the transmitted data and stores the particular
using IoT, which aims to our additional features. All types of area’s pipeline’s location where the blockage has oc-
materials are collected and sorted using a smart sorting system. curred. Further, these servers send message notification to
An associated database with this sorting system will record the corresponding area’s drainage maintenance authority
the type and amount of incoming materials of a particular that a blockage has occurred inside a drainage pipeline
area. Next, the sorted materials are packaged separately, which which needs to be examined immediately. Furthermore,
notifies various organizations that can further process these all these servers are connected to a central server (shown
materials for recycling, fertilizer production, etc. There will as the top server in Fig. 2), which analyzes whether
be another database associated with this packaging system a particular area’s drain clogging occurrences have in-
that will generate monthly/weekly/yearly reports regarding the creased/decreased over time and warns to the respective
amount and type of outgoing packaged materials to different area’s inhabitants basing on the analyzed results.
organizations. These are the core features of the proposed Three types of communication protocols [15], [16] are
system design that can result in an effective smart drainage required for this entire procedure.
management system. • sensor to server requires MQTT or message queuing
telemetry transport protocol (collects sensor data and
B. System Architecture sends to server),
An IoT based system architecture has been planned to • server to server requires AMQP or advanced message
incorporate all the outlined features, which are summarized queuing protocol (provides connection among servers),
as follows along with a flow diagram shown in Fig.1. This and
figure shows that the system architecture is primarily classified • server to the device requires XMPP or extensible
into three sequential phases. Firstly, preventing the drain messaging and presence protocol (provides text com-
clogging, then collecting different solid waste products that are munication to people).
responsible for drain blockage and, finally, preparing the solid As shown in Fig. 2 that data regarding blockage in the
waste products for further processing (e.g., recycling). Now, pipeline of Area 01, Area 02, and Area 03, respectively
the prevention of drain clogging is provided for two types of is transmitted to the corresponding servers. Basing on the
drainage mechanisms - drainage mechanism for infrastructure information from the servers, necessary notifications are
(e.g., home, industry, etc.) and drainage mechanism for road- sent to the concerned authority.
side drains. (b) Drainage mechanism for roadside drains: Roadside
• Prevention of drain clogging for different drainage mech- drains usually have drain covers through which wastew-
anisms (i.e., infrastructure – home, industry, etc. and ater flows. Any object that is unable to pass through
roadside drains). the drain cover would eventually result in obstruction
• Collection of solid waste products responsible for drain to the way of the unrestricted flow of water. Hence, a
blockage. width/thickness measurement sensor (using a triangula-
• Sorting and packaging of solid waste products for further tion reflection method for non-contact measurement) [17]
processing. is used on the street lamp post over the drain cover
The detailed workflow along with necessary technical details (shown in Fig.3), This thickness measurement sensor can
for the above features are depicted as follows: detect objects of specific width/thickness that are unable
to pass through the drain cover. The sensor collects the
1) Prevention of drain clogging: Two considerations have
data and sends it to a server, which further communicates
been taken for the prevention of drain clogging for different
with another server that collects data from a motion
drainage mechanism as explained below:
sensor. Because it is required to check whether the object
(a) Drainage mechanism for infrastructure Different infras- of a specific width is a living object (i.e., rat), which is
tructures, such as a house, educational institution, indus- checked using a motion sensor (using infrared radiation)
try, corporate organizations, etc. have different drainage [18]. This motion sensor is also used on the lamp post
pipes that lead to a central drainage system. These over the drain cover. Now, if the object is of a particular
drainage pipes might get clogged by various materials width and not a living object, then an actuator allows the
used for domestic use, industrial wastes, and many more object to pass through the drain cover. Two types of com-
solid wastes. To monitor unrestricted flow of waste wa- munication protocols [15], [16] are required for this entire
ter through these drainage pipes, a waterproof active procedure – sensor to a server requires MQTT protocol
ultrasonic sensor (as shown in Fig. 2) [14] is used, (collects sensor data and sends to a server), and server
which can detect the presence of an object by measuring to server requires AMQP protocol (provides connection
distance through the transmission of sound waves. Sepa- among servers). This feature is precisely illustrated in
rate ultrasonic sensors are used in drainage pipelines of Fig. 3, which shows that two types of data are collected
different areas. These sensors collect data if any object from the drain cover that lies beside roadside drains.
creates blockage inside pipes. A particular area’s sensor These data indicate whether the actuator associated with
is connected with a particular server (see Fig. 2) that
 Fig. 2: Drainage mechanism for infrastructure.

Fig. 4: Collection of solid waste products responsible for drain

blockage.

Fig. 3: Drainage mechanism for roadside drains.

3) Sorting and packaging of solid waste products for further
processing: The solid wastes enter the optical sorting system
[20], which detects different materials using a spectrometer
the drain cover allows solid wastes of a particular width as every material creates a unique light signature. This sends
along with wastewater to pass into the drainage pipeline data to a server that records the type and amount of different
for further processing. materials over time to generate weekly/monthly/yearly reports
2) Collection of solid waste products: This process is regarding drainage solid wastes. After sorting/detecting, all
illustrated using Fig. 4. As the wastewater and solid wastes the materials are collected to separate packages containing an
pass towards the central drainage system, a fill-level sensor- ultrasonic fill-level sensor [19] that sends data to a server that
based container is positioned horizontally and having a filter notifies various recycling and fertilizer processing companies
on both endpoints. These endpoints are further attached to two when the packages are filled. Moreover, this server also records
vertically positioned pipelines. Thus, as the water enters this which companies are receiving what type of materials over
container, due to gravity, water pours down through the filters time. Two types of communication protocols [15], [16] are
from both sides to the vertically positioned pipelines, further required for this entire procedure – sensor to a server requires
leads to the wastewater treatment plant, and the solid wastes MQTT protocol (collects sensor data and sends to a server),
begin to fill up the container. When this container gets filled, and server to a device requires XMPP protocol (provides text
an ultrasonic fill-level sensor [19] associated with it enables communication to people). This feature is precisely illustrated
an actuator that passes the solid wastes to the optical sorting in Fig. 5, which shows that a sorting system sorts out the solid
system for further processing. waste materials into separate packages that are then directed to
 Fig. 5: Sorting and packaging of solid waste products for further processing.

Fig. 6: The proposed complete IoT based drainage management system.

different waste material processing companies through notifi- • Our system can prevent the drain clogging by detecting
cation. Besides, some associated servers keep record regarding the presence of solid wastes through the use of waterproof
the solid waste materials and their transmission for analytical active ultrasonic sensors,
purposes. • Our system can automaticcly collect the solid waste prod-
ucts that are responsible for drainage system blockage
without human intervention,
C. Combined system
• sorting the solid wastes through optical sorting system
Finally, Fig.6 shows the combined figure consisting of all and separating them for further processing and notifies
the sysmtem components for the IoT based drainage manage- the concerned parties.
ment system that has been described earlier in details. The
main features of our comprehensive smart drainage system
are as follows:
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has proposed the comprehensive system design for such a
smart drainage management system that collectively considers
drainage mechanism for both roadside drains and infrastruc-
tures, including a mechanism for drainage waste management.
We have explained the system features, system architecture,
and working procedure of the system precisely with necessary
technical details. Our future work would be to practically
implement the system according to the design and perform
an experimental analysis to bear significant contribution in
preserving a healthy environment for the overall development
leading to a healthy, safe, and comfortable lifestyle of the
urban community.