Edge Computing Based IoT Architecture for Low Cost Air Pollution Monitoring Systems: A Comprehensive System Analysis, Design Considerations & Development

With the swift growth in commerce and transportation in the modern civilization, much attention has been paid to air quality monitoring, however existing monitoring systems are unable to provide sufficient spatial and temporal resolutions of the data with cost efficient and real time solutions. In this paper we have investigated the issues, infrastructure, computational complexity, and procedures of designing and implementing real-time air quality monitoring systems. To daze the defects of the existing monitoring systems and to decrease the overall cost, this paper devised a novel approach to implement the air quality monitoring system, employing the edge-computing based Internet-of-Things (IoT). In the proposed method, sensors gather the air quality data in real time and transmit it to the edge computing device that performs necessary processing and analysis. The complete infrastructure & prototype for evaluation is developed over the Arduino board and IBM Watson IoT platform. Our model is structured in such a way that it reduces the computational burden over sensing nodes (reduced to 70%) that is battery powered and balanced it with edge computing device that has its local data base and can be powered up directly as it is deployed indoor. Algorithms were employed to avoid temporary errors in low cost sensor, and to manage cross sensitivity problems. Automatic calibration is set up to ensure the accuracy of the sensors reporting, hence achieving data accuracy around 75–80% under different circumstances. In addition, a data transmission strategy is applied to minimize the redundant network traffic and power consumption. Our model acquires a power consumption reduction up to 23% with a significant low cost. Experimental evaluations were performed under different scenarios to validate the system’s effectiveness.