28-01-2016, 12:34 PM
Abstract
Pollution has been aggravated by developments that typically occur as countries become industrialized: growing cities,increasing traffic, rapid economic development and industrialization, and higher levels of energy consumption . The high influx of population to urban areas, increase in consumption patterns and unplanned urban and industrial development has led to the problem of air pollution. Air pollution has significant influence on the concentration of constituents in the atmosphere leading to effects like global warming and acid rains. To avoid such adverse imbalances in the nature, an air pollution monitoring system is utmost important. Wireless Sensor Networks is an excellent technology that can sense, measure, and gather information from the real world and, based on some local decision process transmit the sensed data to the user. These networks allow the physical environment to be measured at high resolutions, and greatly increase the quality and quantity of real-world data and information for applications like pollution monitoring. In this paper, a survey on pollution sensors and pollution monitoring systems using Wireless sensor Networks is presented.
INTRODUCTION
Present advances in electronic circuit miniature and micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) have led to the creation of small sensor nodes which integrate several sensors, a central processing unit (CPU), memory and a wireless transceiver. Sensor networks [1,2] are a collection of these sensor nodes which are easily deployable and provide a high degree of visibility into real-world physical processes as they happen, thus benefitting a variety of applications as in Figure 1. Important applications include environmental and habitat monitoring, healthcare monitoring of patients, weather monitoring and forecasting. Military and homeland security surveillance, tracking of goods and manufacturing processes, safety monitoring of physical structures and construction sites, smart homes and offices, and many other uses that we do not yet imagine. In the U.S., all major cities have networks of monitoring stations providing continuous measurements of the most important pollutants. However, the number of these stations is usually very small. Furthermore, currently the data of the different pollutants measured at the different stations in the city are aggregated to a single number, the air quality index (AQI), that is published once a day on a website. In other words, there is not enough data gathered to evaluate air quality in a given neighbourhood and the publicly available information is even more deficient.