Developed urban air quality monitoring system based on wireless sensor networks

Air pollution is one of environmental issues that have been often discussed. The fast-growing population and urbanization result in the population concentrated in certain areas. Heavy transportation may lead to poor air quality, and inhaling pollutants for a long time also causes damages in human health. A traditional air quality monitoring method is to build air quality monitoring stations, but this method is expensive and provides low resolution sensing data. In addition, monitoring stations are generally less densely deployed. This paper proposed an urban air quality monitoring system based on the wireless sensor network (WSN) technology and integrated with the global system for mobile communications. The system consists of sensor node, a gateway, and a back-end platform controlled by the LabVIEW program through which sensing data can be stored in a database. This system is deployed to the main roads in the Taipei city to monitor the carbon monoxide (CO) concentration caused by vehicle emissions. The experimental results show that the proposed system can provide micro-scale air quality monitoring in real-time through the WSN technology.