Community Sensor Networks: An Application to Pollution Maps

Abstract

Air pollution is a widely recognized threat to our health and the environment in which we live, and can seriously hamper visibility. As currently implemented, air pollution monitoring is based on environmental monitors sparsely deployed at a relatively small number of fixed locations by governmental organizations to develop maps revealing pollution patterns across cities. This lack of pollution monitoring coverage needs to be addressed through complementary technologies, systems and strategies. This paper proposes the use of community sensor networks for the measurement and distribution of air pollution levels. It also proposes the web-based publication of the resulting pollutions maps to promote public participation in the fight against the health and environmental challenges associated with air pollution. The main contributions of this paper are twofold. Firstly, we extend a recently proposed Ubiquitous Sensor Networking (USN) architecture proposed by the ITU in the context of the Internet of the Things (IoT) to propose the main networking architecture behind community sensor networks. Secondly, building upon off-the-shelf sensor devices and existing web services, we present the experimental results and pollution maps built in the city of Cape Town in South Africa as a proof of concept on how community sensor networks can be built using least cost equipment and how pollution maps can be derived from the pollutant levels collected through these networks