A research-oriented low-cost air pollution monitoring IoT platform

This paper presents an IoT platform designed for air pollution monitoring. It aiming to facilitate the testing of different data collection strategies, to simplify the air quality monitoring process, to provide the citizens with real-time information about air pollution, to allow citizens to participate in the air quality monitoring process, and to help the authorities identify zones of high air pollution and take the most appropriate measures to improve air quality. The sensor nodes have been developed using low-cost off-the-shelf hardware. Both nomadic and mobile sensor nodes have been developed. A novel sensor management middleware has been designed and developed to have the flexibility to remotely control the operational settings of the sensor nodes and to reduce the volume of transmitted data. Finally, two applications have been developed and implemented for data visualization. The first is a mobile friendly air pollution meter. The second offers a spatial visualization of air pollution levels using a Geographic Information System (GIS). The developed platform has been tested in multiple measurement campaigns. The results of one of these campaigns (conducted in Hay Nahda II, Rabat, Morocco) is presented in this paper to showcase the platform. © 2020 IEEE.