Understanding and managing large sensor networks

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.