A Concept Paper on Smart River Monitoring System for Sustainability in River

River is a major source of water in Malaysia and one of the major threats to its sustainability is pollution. The existing methods for monitoring of water quality in rivers are manual monitoring and continuous monitoring. These methods are costly and less efficient. Hence, we propose a smart river monitoring system (SRMS) that uses unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones and low power wide area (LPWA) communication technology. The Internet of Things (IoT) and data analytic are promising techniques which provide real-time monitoring and enhances efficiency. However, due to the span of river that needs to be monitored, conventional communication technology such as Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Bluetooth are not suitable. Hence, there is the need for LPWA communication technology. We discuss the application of LPWA and UAV for sustainability of rivers in Malaysia as a case study. Preliminary results show that the use of UAV will increase the efficiency of measuring the water quality parameters compared to manual monitoring method. Also, real-time monitoring enables us to study the changes in water quality. Finally, we provide future direction in the application of UAV and LPWA for sustainability in river.