The PeRvasive Environment Sensing and Sharing Solution

Paolo Bellavista,Riccardo Zamagna,Carlo Giannelli

doi:10.3390/su9040585

Abstract

To stimulate better user behavior and improve environmental and economic sustainability, it is of paramount importance to make citizens effectively aware of the quality of the environment in which they live every day. In particular, we claim that users could significantly benefit from cost-effective efficient Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions that provide them with up-to-date live information about air pollution in the areas where they live, suitably adapted to different situations and with different levels of dynamically selected granularities (e.g., at home/district/city levels). Our PeRvasive Environment Sensing and Sharing (PRESS) project has the ambition of increasing users’ awareness of the natural environment they live in, as a first step towards improved sustainability; the primary target is the efficient provisioning of real-time user-centric information about environmental conditions in the surroundings, and in particular about air pollution. To this purpose, we have designed, implemented, and thoroughly evaluated the PRESS framework, which is capable of achieving good flexibility and scalability while integrating heterogeneous monitoring data, ranging from sensed air pollution to user-provided quality perceptions. Among the elements of technical originality, PRESS exploits extended Kura IoT gateways with novel congestion detection and recovery mechanisms that allow us to optimize bandwidth allocation between in-the-field PRESS components and the cloud. The reported performance results show the feasibility of the proposed solution, by pointing out not only the scalability and efficiency of the adopted message-based solution that uses Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and WebSockets, but also the capability of PRESS to quickly identify and manage traffic congestions, thus, ensuring good quality levels to final users.

Highlights

It has started to be widely recognized that to increase the environmental and economic sustainability of user behavior, it is of paramount importance to make users aware of the quality of the environment they live in every day
We have developed, deployed, and thoroughly evaluated our PeRvasive Environment Sensing and Sharing (PRESS) framework, which is based on the Spring technology framework and on the widespread Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol, and verified its scalability when gathering and storing datastreams of significant volume
Packets are dispatched by an executor component written in Java that exploits the functions offered by our PRESS Gateway, sending messages at variable packet frequencies and different MQTT quality levels Packets are received by a gauge component written in JavaScript and exploit features provided by our PRESS User

Summary

Introduction

It has started to be widely recognized that to increase the environmental and economic sustainability of user behavior, it is of paramount importance to make users aware of the quality of the environment they live in every day. To enable the above scenario by benefitting from already deployed and dynamically discovered sensors, there is the need to consider air pollution data sensed from a plethora of heterogeneous sensing devices, as well as to get an aggregated view of the data sensed in a given geographical area and in a specific time period. In this manner, while sensors located in given localities will be useful to gather information on the private surroundings of specific users, with the correct levels of visibility/granularity, a more aggregated and summarized view will positively affect the knowledge of air quality in wider areas of an overall smart city

Methods

Results

Conclusion