Solid Waste Management Architecture

using Wireless Sensor Network technology

Sauro Longhi , Davide Marzioni , Emanuele Alidori , Gianluca Di Bu`o ,
Mario Prist , Massimo Grisostomi and Matteo Pirro
Universit`a

Politecnica delle Marche, Dipartimento di Ingegneria dellInformazione

Via Brecce Bianche. snc, 60131 Ancona, Italy
Website: http://www.dii.univpm.it/ Email: sauro.longhi@univpm.it
IDEA Soc. Coop. a r.l. Website: http://www.idea-on-line.it

AbstractIn many application fields such as home, industry,

environment and health, different Wireless Sensor Network
(WSN) applications have been developed to solve management
problems with smart implementations. This approach can be
applied in the filed of solid waste management. In this paper a
new architecture is proposed with the aim to improve the on-site
handling and transfer optimization in the waste management
process. The system architecture is based on sensor nodes and
makes use of Data Transfer Nodes (DTN) in order to provide
to a remote server the retrieved data measurements from the
garbage bins filling. A remote monitoring solution has been
implemented, providing user the possibility to interact with
the system by using a web browser. Several activities with the
aim to provide a Decision Support System (DSS) able to find
solutions for resources organization problems linked to solid
waste management have been started.
Index Terms - Solid waste management, Wireless Sensor
Network, Remote Monitoring, Decision Support System.

I. I NTRODUCTION
High population density in large urban areas makes hard the
solution of solid waste management problems [1]. To reduce
the environment impact of the waste dumping, many municipal
corporate are involved in the development of efficient waste
management systems. Solid waste management is a complex
process that involves many steps: it includes generation, onsite handling and storage, collection, transfer, processing and
disposal of solid wastes [1]. All these sub-processes have to
be implemented within existing legal, social, regulations which
take care of the environment and of the public health.
This paper is focused on the on-site handling and storage
processes and on the transfer process, with the main topic at
developing a smart solid waste management system capable
to ensure the public health with costs reduction and quality
improvement. In order to enhance the efficiency of solid
wastes on-site collection and transfer, an innovative solution
for the monitoring and management system has been proposed.
A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has been developed to
improve the garbage bins monitoring process.
A WSN consists of many autonomous sensor nodes, spatially distributed, capable to monitor physical characteristics
(e.g. temperature, humidity, light, vibration, pressure, etc.)
and designed to exchange their data through the network.
Sensors link the physical with the digital world by capturing

and revealing real-world phenomena and converting these into

a form that can be processed, stored, and acted upon. A
wireless sensor node has not only sensing components, but
also on-board processing unit, chip radio and storage units.
With these enhancements, a sensor node is often not only
responsible for data collection, but also for in-network analysis
based on correlation and fusion of its own data with those
retrieved from other nodes. Moreover, sensor nodes can differ
in their communication capabilities with different data rates
and latencies. They can help to avoid catastrophic infrastructure failures, conserve precious natural resources, increase
productivity, enhance security, and enable new applications
such as context-aware systems and smart home technologies.
While many sensors connect to controllers and processing
stations directly (e.g., using local area networks), an increasing
number of sensors communicate the collected data wirelessly
to a centralized processing station. This is important since
many network applications require hundreds or thousands
of sensor nodes, often deployed in remote and inaccessible
areas. With these enhancements, a sensor node is often not
only responsible for data collection, but also for in-network
analysis, correlation, and fusion of its own sensor data and data
from other sensor nodes. When many sensors cooperatively
monitor large physical environments, they form a wireless
sensor network (WSN). Sensor nodes communicate not only
with each other but also with a base station (BS) using their
wireless radios, allowing them to disseminate their sensor
data to remote processing, visualization, analysis, and storage
systems [11], [12].
In such architecture each sensor node performs data acquisition and data transfer. The acquired data are sent to a
supervisor system, which supports the user in the finding of
solutions to decision problems, such as the optimization of resources organization (trucks, people and specific machineries),
with the main task to perform costs reduction.
In this architecture some sensors are equipped with more
powerful computation and communication capabilities in order
to perform extensive processing processing and data fusion
functionalities. Such devices perform data transfers among
different resource constrained networks.
In the supervisor system a key role is reserved to the
Decision Support System (DSS) for supporting the system

978-1-4673-0229-6/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

administrator [2], [3]. In this system data-mining and path optimization tools are also considered to improve the efficiency
of the solid waste management process.
The paper is organized into four sections. After this introduction, the second section presents the case study based on
the solid waste management problem. The third one addresses
to the employed system architecture. Successive subsections
describe the architecture layer details. The paper ends with
the conclusion section.
II. C ASE OF STUDY
Over the last decade, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), initially developed as life cycle evaluation, has been extended
to environmental impacts evaluation in order to quantify the
emissions generated with the aim to provide support tools that
simplify the choice among different solid waste management
policies [4], [5]. This important choice should be taken,
considering both economic efficiency and social acceptability.
Thus, a solid waste management system can be summarized
into two main steps:
1) solid waste collection and transport;
2) recycling and final disposal.
Until now, in solid waste management problems, LCA has
been mainly applied on the second step, by defining cost comparison indexes, collection techniques (Kerberside collection)
or specifying the materials that should be collected because
their great environmental impact. In addition, some people
have focused their attention on the realization of logistic
models with the aim to predict the behavior of a city in
terms of number of vehicles, mileage, costs and pollution, but
without concerning of transport optimization problems [6].
Previous studies, referred to Province of Varese, evaluated
how the vehicles employed in the solid waste management
process influence the environmental impacts. The studies estimated that truck emissions are proportional to the product
between the cargo and half the mileage (t km), except for compactors, whose emissions are proportional to the press working
time. The evaluation of the environmental impacts generated
during the solid waste collection and transport processes is
briefly shown in Figure 1, with reference to the recycling and
final disposal process [7]. The figure shows the overall impacts
generated, sorted by 11 categories, highlighting the need to improve the collection and transport processes handling. Several
efforts are needed to improve the planning of vehicles paths
in order to make lower the fossil fuel consumption. Smart
paths choices can provide benefits for local administrations,
for example by reducing maintenance costs and fuel demand.
Two of the main approaches followed in the transport
process optimization are the following:
1) shortest path searching;
2) best path searching in terms of garbage bins fillings
prediction.
In this paper an innovative solution for the second approach
is described. It represents the main results of Smart Ecologic
Area (SEA) project, where several efforts have been done in

Fig. 1.

PPGR impacts registered in Varese city (Source: [7], p. 5)

Fig. 2.

SEA project system architecture

order to create a system architecture easily adaptable to the

different scenarios of the solid waste management (e.g. cities,
small town, mountain resorts, isolated areas, etc.). The next
chapter will address with these issues into detail.
III. S YSTEM ARCHITECTURE
The main components of the developed architecture on the
SEA project are decomposed into three layers, as shown in
Figure 2.
Starting from the bottom, the garbage bins reside at the first
one, the DTNs at the second one and the supervisor system
at the third one. In detail, each garbage bin is supported by
sensor nodes which provide the filling monitoring and are able
to send the retrieved data to the supervisor system, through
the DTNs. Custom garbage bin prototypes in order to allow
simple installation of sensor nodes have been designed and
built (Figure 3). In this context, the entire system has been
designed to allow the different kind of WSNs to communicate
with each other, through the different standard sets. These
includes the IEEE 802.15.4, WiFi, GSM and GPRS.
Done these preliminary remarks, the whole system has been
designed to have physical architecture based on three layers.
the first layer is composed by sensor nodes, which

Fig. 3.

Custom garbage bin prototype.

Fig. 5.

SEA project - WSN architecture

management process.
A. The developed WSN architecture

Fig. 4.

ArgosD sensor node.

need for the filling monitoring and provide short-range

transmissions through RF technology;
the second layer is composed by communication modules, which provide long-range transmission through
GSM/GPRS;
the third layer is composed by servers, which provide
data storage and supervisor modules.

Taking into account the different scenarios, the components of the first layer provides several benefits within urban
contexts by the use of the Industrial Scientific and Medical
(ISM) bands, which allow low power transmissions without
requiring a telephone operator subscription. For this solution
a cost reduction of 50% has been estimated. The second
layer acts as a bridge between sensor nodes and servers. It
consists of GSM/GPRS nodes which provide long-range data
transfers, ensuring the remote system monitoring and faults
detection. In addition, they should provide mechanisms for the
firmware updating of sensor nodes and their communication
modules. Differently from the components of the first layer,
the components of the second one provide benefits within
geographical areas with low population density or difficult to
reach, like for example widely areas. Finally, the third layer
consists of servers that provide data storage and data-mining
solutions, ensuring the development of a Decision Support
System (DSS). The DSS should be adaptable to the different
operative contexts and should be able to extract consistent
data from the database, in order to optimize the solid waste

The developed architecture is described in a typical application of urban scenario, where Wireless Sensor Networks
(WSNs) have to be configured with different components to
provide a remote monitoring service of each node, as shown
in Figure 5.
In the SEA project architecture, IDEAs ArgosD sensor
nodes (shown in Figure 4) have been used to create the
various Low Power Area Networks (LowPans). Gateway terminals provide communication between LowPans and Internet,
implementing the DTN functionalities. Easily commercially
available IEEE 802.15.4 compliant CC2420 RF transceivers
[13] have been used as radio modules; MSP430 chips[14] have
been employed as sensor nodes MCUs. A custom application
has been built using TinyOS 2.1.1 OS components in order to
manage sensors data retrieving and SPI communication with
RF transceiver.
Embedded solutions based on New/Linux OS are used for
the gateway terminals.
The interaction mechanism between a remote host and
LowPans is based on IPv4 packets exchange. When the user
wants to interact with a sensor node, IPv4 packets are sent
to the remote server, which delivered them to the gateway
terminal through the Internet. Once a packet is received, the
edge router connected to the gateway terminal performs a
translation of it into 6LowPan-IPv6 packet and dispatches
it to the node, via the IEEE 802.15.4 physic layer. On the
opposite scenario, sensor nodes periodically notify to a remote
server the garbage bin filling measurement acquired, allowing
a remote host to retrieve data from it. Implemented demo
scenario consists on a simple low pan area network composed
by nine nodes and an edge router.

Fig. 7.

Fig. 8.
Fig. 6.

Client-Server interaction

SMS to HTTP GET REQUEST translation

OpenCPU software architecture (Source: [8], p. 11)

B. Long-range communication module

Long range communication board has been developed in
order to provide a flexible and reliable low-cost DTN. Quectel
M10 GSM/GPRS module, based on the embedded OpenCPU
[8], has been used. OpenCPU is a software layer, running
on an embedded ARM processor, which provides a powerful
support environment to facilitate the development of costeffective wireless machine-to-machine applications for Quectel
M10 module. Using standard C-language, OpenCPU enables
to develop innovative embedded applications. Figure 6 shows
the fundamental principles of OpenCPU software architecture.
C. Server implementation
Server layer implements the role of mediator between users
and WSNs. The interaction with the long-range communication modules has to be carefully designed. At this regard,
in the SEA project architecture, two solutions have been
implemented to allow data transfers between modem and
server:
1) Socket TCP/IP;
2) SMS.
The socket approach represents the classical method to
send some data to a well known device attached to the net,
like the server. This solution requires a daemon software
running on the server, which continuously listens for incoming
transmissions. When the long-range communication module
needs to send data, it opens a communication socket with the
daemon, using TCP protocol. In addition, the daemon needs
to be multi-threading in order to manage several connection
requests at the same time, as shown in the Figure 7.
Once the daemon receives the data it stores them directly
into the database, which can be local or remote. The implementation solution of daemon makes a pre-elaboration of
received data to ensure consistency. A GPRS connection is
required. The second approach, based on SMS, has been
implemented to support the data acquisition when GPRS
connection is missing. In the classical solution SMS is sent to

a gateway node which forwards an HTTP GET request with

the SMS data, as shown in Figure 8.
SMS approach also offers two new scenarios easy to manage:
1) Modem can send data directly to the user;
2) User(or System Administrator) interacts with the remote
long-range communication module.
One of the main benefits of the first one is related to the realtime updating on the users mobile phone. Another advance
takes place when historical data analysis is not needed. Longrange communication module can be reached directly by user
without the use of server, enhancing money saving. About
the second, the modem is properly configured to receive its
settings by SMS, containing remote configurations updating.
This scenario is more difficult to manage with the socket
approach in a real-time context.
Both socket and SMS approach are implemented to improve
the system reliability.
D. User interface
The whole system provides two ways to allow a user to
interact with it:
1) a custom software client;
2) a WEB browser.
The first one consists on a client installed on the users PC,
which has access to the central DB. This solution is a bit
old-fashioned and lacks of flexibility. On the others side, the
second one uses the modern cloud computing. Users dont
have to install anything and can have access to the WEB
application through a common WEB browser.
Referring to the SEA project, one of the most important
requirements is the remote filling monitoring of the garbage
bins. Starting from this, the server provides the best path
for the gathering with TSP (Travelling Salesman Problem)
algorithm, as shown in Figure 10.
The figure shows a representation of data collect by WSN
into the user interface. On the left side of the screenshot, with a
slider, is shown the filling of the selected bins. In this interface,

Fig. 9.

User mobile phone-Modem SMS interaction

process (people, trucks and machineries) and increases performances. Particurarly interesting is the paradigm of DSS based
on Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) [9], [10] that collects a list of
cases (which is a particular condition of bins filling, resources
and time to execute waste transportation) with a possible
solution. This type of DSS approaches the waste management
problem in the same way of human brain. It tries to solve cases
finding some equal past problem and remembering the adopted
solution. Resolved problems are collected inside a Case Base
(CB) containing cases and relative solution. The introduction
of GPS system gives more detail regarding bins position. This
feature will be an important data to implement the trucks path
optimization.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .

Fig. 10.

Example of system monitoring GUI

the bins position data is loaded manually by the user, but we

are working to add a GPS module to do this automatically.
IV. C ONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS
In this paper a possible solution for solid waste management
has been proposed. A wireless sensor network has been used
to control the filling of the bin collecting data from embedded
sensors. Through long-range communication modules all data
are sent to a remote server where operator controls the state
of the whole system. The edge routers allow nodes interfacing
with an access gateway to Internet. Firmware for QuectelM10 modem, developed by using OpenCPU, has prooven to
be functional for the testing time allowing data transmission to
server and the remote debugging features. Software application
provides data for route planning and presents them through a
user-friendly interface.
Several efforts for the whole system optimization have to
be made. These include:

the increasing of sensor nodes battery life-time, in order

to reduce maintenance;
the improvement of electromagnetic shielding interfaces,
in order to reduce interferences;
the improvement of remote querying efficiency and robustness;
the improvement of the GUI adaptation to the local
administrations needs;
the improvement of the garbage bin prototype in order to
realize a final product.

The objectives of future researches will be also the implementation of Decision Support System (DSS) and GPS
support. DSS helps the operator in the resources organization

The authors would like to thank Regione Marche which

support the project by a grant: POR MARCHE FESR
2007-2013 - INTERVENTO 1.3.1.07.01 SOSTEGNO ALLA
NASCITA E ALLO SVILUPPO DI NUOVE IMPRESE INNOVATIVE. Thanks are also reserved to Quectel customer
support which provides contributions on the long-range communication modules development. This paper has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of WSN-ADT Workshop that had been held in conjunction with NTMS 2012.
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