sensors Article Wireless Middleware Solutions for Smart Water Metering Stefano Alvisi 1 , Francesco Casellato 1, Marco Franchini 1 , Marco Govoni 1, Chiara Luciani 1, Filippo Poltronieri 1,* , Giulio Riberto 1, Cesare Stefanelli 1 and Mauro Tortonesi 2 1 Department of Engineering, University of Ferrara, 44122 Ferrara, Italy;
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[email protected]; Tel.: +39-0532-97-4114 Received: 14 January 2019; Accepted: 16 April 2019; Published: 18 April 2019 Abstract: While smart metering applications have initially focused on energy and gas utility markets, water consumption has recently become the subject of increasing attention. Unfortunately, despite the large number of solutions available on the market, the lack of an open and widely accepted communication standard means that vendors typically propose proprietary data collection solutions whose adoption causes non-trivial problems to water utility companies in term of costs, vendor lock-in, and lack of control on the data collection infrastructure. There is the need for open and interoperable smart water metering solutions, capable of collecting data from the wide range of water meters on the market. This paper reports our experience in the development and field testing of a highly interoperable smart water metering solution, which we designed in collaboration with several water utility companies and which we deployed in Gorino Ferrarese, Italy, in collaboration with CADF (Consorzio Acque Delta Ferrarese), the water utility serving the city.