Evaluation of LoRa WAN network performance for a water level sensing and monitoring scenario in Mosul Dam

The Mosul Dam project was built on weakly, unstable generational land, and when it enters into contact with the water, its properties change. As a result, excess water in several vertical apertures in the dam’s body must be observed to warn against the possibility of the dam collapse. A bar scale is used to initially measure the water column depth in the dam apertures. This research proposes a new system using wireless sensors injected as a floated object on the water columns altimeter and sending the water-level values to LoRa-WAN in real-time. This study simulates a new Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRa-WAN) technology to monitor a variety of water levels in Mosul Dam, which is linked to an Internet of Things (IoT) structure that is based on wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A LoRa gateway is employed to transfer these data over it. Alerts will be transmitted by end devices and received by the LoRa WAN, showing the specific end devices position, if the water levels exceed the allowable predetermined level. The network will then take suitable measures. This paper displays a simulation software implementation omnet++ to evaluate the performance of LoRa as an outcome of implementation across the FLoRa framework to simulate monitoring the water level in Mosul Dam. The performance impact of LoRa networks was evaluated on Network Energy Consumed and Packet Delivery Ratio for (1) the number of gateways, and (2) the distance between each end device and the LoRa gateway. Our results demonstrated that optimizing the parameters that impact a LoRa network’s performance can convert traditional monitoring to smart monitoring as well as the capability of one LoRa gateway to run up to (1000) end devices.