Towards Internet of Things: Design and Implementation of a Vehicle Measurement System for Air Quality Monitoring

The detection of environmental pollution sources and their geographical position is of crucial importance to the pollution management. High costs of the existing measurement stations induce their sparse deployment over the area of interest. Moreover, their sampling rates are usually low. As such these systems fail to meet the application requirements regarding the spatial and temporal resolution. To improve this, modern approaches aim to incorporate much greater number of stationary low-cost wireless sensor systems over the same area, to use mobile devices, or the combination of both. This paper presents a design and implementation of an air quality (AQ) measurement system for Vehicle Sensor Networks (VSN). The system is based on Arduino board (microcontroller), various gas sensors, and GPRS communication modules. The nodes installed on the vehicles continuously transmit AQ indicators over the GPRS link to the server. User-friendly web interface enables data visualization in real time. The proposed system was tested on accuracy and functionality over a period of 10 days, and it has shown satisfying results