Measuring air quality in city areas by vehicular wireless sensor networks

This paper considers a micro-climate monitoring scenario, which usually requires deploying a large number of sensor nodes to capture environmental information. By exploiting vehicular sensor networks (VSNs), it is possible to equip fewer nodes on cars to achieve fine-grained monitoring. Specifically, when a car is moving, it could conduct measurements at different locations, thus collecting lots of sensing data. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a VSN architecture to collect and measure air quality for micro-climate monitoring in city areas, where nodes’ mobility may be uncontrollable (such as taxis). In the proposed VSN architecture, we address two network-related issues: (1) how to adaptively adjust the reporting rates of mobile nodes to satisfy a target monitoring quality with less communication overhead and (2) how to exploit opportunistic communications to reduce message transmissions. We propose algorithms to solve these two issues and verify their performances by simulations. In addition, we also develop a ZigBee-based prototype to monitor the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) gas in city areas.