A vehicular wireless sensor network for CO2 monitoring

Micro-climate monitoring usually requires deploying a large number of measurement tools. By adopting vehicular wireless sensor networks (VSNs), we can use fewer tools to achieve fine-grained monitoring. This work proposes a VSN architecture to realize micro-climate monitoring based on GSM short messages and availability of GPS receivers on vehicles. We demonstrate our prototype of a ZigBee-based car network to monitor the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO
₂
) gas in areas of interest. The reported data are sent to a server, which is integrated with Google Maps as our user interface. Since mobility of these vehicles is not controllable and sending short messages incurs charges, we also design an on-demand approach to adjust vehicles' reporting rates to balance between the micro-climate accuracy and the communication cost.