An "Internet of Thing” vision of the Flood Monitoring Problem

River flood monitoring is a complex problem of max-imum social relevance in densely inhabited areas. Flash floods are becoming more and more dangerous every year due to an increase of rapid and extreme rainfalls events induced by climate changes, particularly in Genoa: the rivers flooded twice in twenty days in two different parts of the town. The complexity of the problem originates from the diversity of the territory involved in the monitoring process in regions like Liguria in Italy: from relatively far mountains (or plain regions) generally scarcely populated, to densely populated urban areas traversed by streams, often flowing underground. Environmental monitoring is classified at the 14th position among the Top 50 “Internet of Things” (IoT) applications for a Smarter World. IoT is an emerging paradigm that combines the main features of Cloud Computing (pervasive capability of storage and computation via Internet) with wireless sensor networks that provide cooperative use of distributed sensors. In addition to these features, IoT often provides interfaces for data streaming management in real-time, back end for data analysis and visualization. A IoT approach to the considered problem seems almost necessary in order to improve the integration level of the data, sensors and applications and provide software tools for cooperation of heterogeneous groups of end-users involving institutions with different level of responsibilities, knowledge and capabilities (from sensor experts to non-expert citizens). In the present paper, we redesign previous experiences based on intelligent wireless sensors network (WSN) in terms of IoT with the aim of improving its reliability and efficiency and especially of rendering the problem widely scalable.