Urban pollution monitoring through opportunistic mobile sensor networks based on public transport

The development of an opportunistic sensor network deployed on regular public transport vehicles with the aim of obtaining a flexible pollution monitoring system over large urban areas is presented. Georeferenced pollution data is acquired by a modular autonomous sensing system placed on vehicles which has been developed and is being currently tested. Short and long range communication systems are used to transmit data from the mobile sources to the central data processing and mapping unit. Within this unit an application to represent the geopositioned pollutant measurements has been implemented based on Google Earth. This provides the user with an interface allowing the study of the evolution of the gas concentrations along a given bus route as well as on the whole urban area.