Performance and Energy Evaluation of Multi-Hop Network Topologies for Water Distribution Monitoring

Abstract

Real-time monitoring of urban water distribution systems has become a critical requirement in modern smart urbanization, rendering traditional manual monitoring and data recording methods obsolete. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a comprehensive study on the empirical evaluation of power consumption and communication performance in a low-cost Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) using the NRF24L01+ transceiver. Although natively restricted to basic point-to-point and single-level star topologies, a custom multi-hop routing protocol utilizing an advanced octal addressing scheme was developed to enable multi-tier network scalability. Three network topologies Star, Tree, and Series Tree were implemented and combined with two message scheduling mechanisms: By-Request polling and Round-Robin data aggregation. The system was subjected to rigorous testing under both Line-of-Sight (LOS) and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) conditions across complex, obstacle-dense environments including concrete walls and heavy foliage. The experimental results reveal that the proposed multi-hop framework successfully achieves a 0% packet loss rate across seven obstacle zones where traditional Peer-to-Peer (P2P) connections fail entirely. Furthermore, the By-Request scheduling combined with a Series Tree topology demonstrated superior energy efficiency, requiring a minimal total power output of only 91.86 mWh over an operational period of one hour. Balancing data rates between 250 Kbps and 2 Mbps provides optimal real-time monitoring stability and low latency (6 ms per node). These findings provide a scalable, highly cost-effective blueprint for large-scale municipal water asset management.