A cooperative sensing system for air quality monitoring in urban areas

Air quality has a serious impact on the public health and the environment. Therefore, real-time and accurate monitoring tools are necessary in order to measure the air pollution level and take appropriate and timely decisions. In this paper we present uSense, a cooperative sensing system for real-time and fine-grained air-quality monitoring in urban areas. uSense allows people to measure the air quality in the places where they live and spend much of their time (e.g. nearby their homes or workplaces), by just deploying small, low-cost sensor nodes. These sensor nodes periodically measure the concentrations of polluting gases and send the acquired data to a server. The collected data are then shared among the users, using a social networking approach, so that each person can contribute to monitor the area where she/he lives and, at the same time, can check the air quality in other parts of the city. uSense has been tested in a field test, performed on four different urban areas, and proved to be both reliable and efficient.