have become a trend in every developed and developing country. Barcelona is one of the best
examples of smart cities, with various ongoing smart cities project; the city has become syn-
onymous with innovation and technological development. The Barcelona Council and Star lab
have worked together to develop a smart water project to monitor and control the irrigation
technologies in the centre of Poblenou Park.
One Click Operation to Manage the Irrigation System
Starlab along with two other companies have effectively developed a remote-controlled
irrigation system for Barcelona that would help to improve its Smart City status. The company
has started to monitor soil moisture within the situ probes. Plus, they have deployed sensors
that are capable of remotely controlling the irrigation system to improve the water management
network.
Before the establishment of the project, each area of the park was analyzed and studied
well in order to know the important needs. Thanks to the soil moisture sensors, the smart
irrigation system is capable of controlling and monitoring the humidity and water flow
very strategically towards the area. The deployed sensors are very advanced and versatile
in nature. They eectively enable the link among a wide range of sensor nodes that do not
necessarily belong to the same manufacturer. The probes are placed underground together
with a wireless platform which is put under a waterproof box to ensure the maximum du-
rability. Moreover, they are also powered with long-life batteries with a massive life of an
entire year. The data obtained from the sensor platform gets directly sent to the cloud or a
gateway. This communication can be done through various communication protocols like
GPRS, 3G, 4G, LoRa, Sigfox, 900MHZ, 800MHZ, Zigbee, 802.15.4, NFC, and Bluetooth. In
this specific project, they have used Zigbee for data communication. The majority of the
communication devices are installed in the gardener huts. The information collected in the
gateway could easily be visualized in a platform which allows us to know the exact state of
the monitored zone. The departments of Barcelona Council and Urban Services & comput-
ing have worked closelytogether to carry out the application to be controlled by computers,
tablets and smartphones.
If you take a walk in the Polenou Park Centre, then you will see a couple of sta members
using tablets intensively. Mind you this is not how they spend their spare time. In fact, the tab-
lets they are using are their new work tools. They are monitoring and controlling the irrigation
system in the park premises.
Cutting Down Wastage of Water and Money
The new system greatly helps in irrigation according to the weather conditions and needs
of the plants. It optimizes water consumption and reduces wastage by a large margin.
By implementing the new system, the water bill has been cut down by 25%. Thus, Barcelona
is an environmentally responsible city by saving natural resources like water with the help
of the Internet of Things. This new system has also benefited the gardeners, now their
dailyworktasks have been eased. Controlling the irrigation system is now always done in
real-time.
242 Internet of Things
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