Ubiquitous Micro Mapping of Air Pollution Using Vehicular Edge-Based Connected IoT Services

Abstract

The phenomenon of air pollution is being discussed everywhere around the globe. The monitoring of air pollution is the crucial and first step to formulating any laws for pollution control. An exhaustive mapping and monitoring approach for air pollution can be of huge asset to our society. However, the initial step of monitoring needs to be performed with utmost care. The efforts in this direction have already been made, considering measures like installing air quality monitoring stations in parts of cities. But, the existing systems are stagnant, and the data aggregated from these stations is regarded as the pollution level of even far-fetched regions. This completely ignores the spatial variation of air pollution in different sub-regions and poses a significant challenge to getting insights at the sub-region level. A proposition for this obstacle has been discussed in this article. The proposed solution would be a great asset for government/non-government agencies to check pollution levels at different locations and plan countermeasures more effectively. In the proposed method, vehicles are fitted with edge computing-based Internet of Things (IoT) powered sensing devices. The networking ability of Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET) is adopted for creating an IoT-connected environment to capture the pollution level of any sub-region in real-time, providing dynamic nature to the air pollution monitoring scheme. By leveraging the power of these technologies, it is easier to get pollution details of the complete route that the vehicle has to pass through to its destination. Travelling via a route with lesser pollution would be a boon for people with an aversion to air pollution or respiratory issues. Chandigarh, a Union Territory of India, has been taken under case study to verify state of the art. The city is already equipped with three continuous air quality monitoring towers by which the pollution levels of the whole 114 sq meter of the city are monitored. The results depict the variation of maximum and minimum values captured in a stagnant monitoring tower to the proposed dynamic system. Using the dynamic systems, air pollution levels of even different regions fall on the route between these monitoring stations. In summary, the edge-based vehicular system can be used to provide pollution-free route tracking, thereby changing the dynamics of healthy living.