BATTERY-FREE FLOOD MONITORING: TOWARD SUSTAINABLE DATA COLLECTION APPROACH

Floods are among the most destructive natural hazards, causing severe loss of life and damage to infrastructure. The frequency and intensity of floods is also being worsened by climate change. In tropical regions like Vietnam, heavy rainfall can rapidly swell rivers, while in Europe, fast moving storms often trigger flash floods. Reliable, low-cost, and sustainable flood monitoring is crucial, yet traditional battery-powered nodes fall short due to their limited lifespan, high maintenance costs, and environmental impact. To address this, Quy Nhon University has collaborated with KU Leuven to develop battery-free wireless flood sensors that harvest ambient energy to operate sustainably. Our adaptive design suits both remote tropical regions and energy-scarce European environments.

Fig.1. Deployed Flood Nodes: (a) in Quy Nhon Bac Ward, Gia Lai Province, Vietnam; (b) in Leuven, Belgium.

This research initiative has resulted in two complementary papers. The first paper [1] presents the design and deployment of a generic battery-free IoT platform for environmental monitoring. We offer an open-source license, enabling developers to build many kinds of battery-free IoT applications. Our second paper [2] introduces FloodTracker, a battery-free platform for wireless flood monitoring that integrates novel sensors, NB-IoT networking, and self-adaptive power management to simplify deployment and long-term operation. Experiments demonstrate that FloodTracker achieves 98% uptime across two continents with contrasting weather conditions – Southern Asia (Vietnam) and Western Europe (Belgium). Furthermore, we leverage novel LiDAR sensors to measure depth at 4x the range of previous approaches.

All hardware, software and data are available under an open source license. Live data from the nodes deployed in Belgium are available here. Both papers [1,2] were published at Mobiquitous, a top IoT conference. Besides these two papers, our work also forms the foundation for several master’s theses in the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven.

References

[1] Van-Vu Bui, Shuaibu Musa Adam, Brendan James Mackenzie, Ashok Samraj Thangarajan, Mengyao Liu, Sam Michiels, Nelson Souto Rosa, Phuong Huynh Nguyen Bao, Danny Hughes, Flute: Enabling a Battery-Free and Energy Harvesting Ecosystem for the Internet of Things, EAI MobiQuitous 2023, volume 594, issue Part 2, 13 pages, Melbourne, Australia, November 14-17, 2023.

[2] Van-Vu Bui, Brendan James Mackenzie, Shuaibu Musa Adam, Sam Michiels, Phuong Huynh Nguyen Bao, Danny Hughes, FloodTracker: Towards Truly Wireless and Battery-Free Flood Monitoring with Flute, EAI MobiQuitous 2025, 20 pages, Shanghai, China, November 7-9 , 2025.