Internet of Things-Based Air Pollution Monitoring System for the Indoor Environment Utilizing Light Fidelity Technology

Indoor air pollution is a major environmental health problem. Exposure to air pollutants can cause many negative health effects, including respiratory problems and heart diseases. To control indoor air pollution, continuous monitoring is necessary. This paper presents an air pollution monitoring system based on the Internet of Things (IoT), which refers to the network of physical objects embedded with sensors, software, and connectivity to enable them to exchange data with other connected devices and systems over the communication network. It is suggested to use optical wireless communication (OWC) via light fidelity (Li-Fi) that utilizes visible LED lighting for data transmission purposes. Visible light communication (VLC) was selected due to the current congestion of the radio frequency band, which is extensively employed for data transmission and unable to satisfy the requirements of the forthcoming 6
^th
generation networks. In this paper, the air pollution monitoring system consists of a MQ135 sensor and a dust module sensor to measure polluted data in an indoor environment; the sensors are connected to the Arduino microcontroller for digital processing; and the measured data are transmitted to the ThingSpeak cloud by utilizing an ESP-32 module. The user can access the ThingSpeak web application to monitor air pollution levels through the VLC system. Optisystem tool V18 simulates the VLC system connected with fiber optic channel (FOC) and free-space optic (FSO) channels to transmit the link of the web application to the end user. This paper intends to verify the performance of the VLC system. The proposed system’s performance was evaluated based on the quality factor and the bit error rate (BER) at varying distances in dusty weather. The proposed system demonstrated a satisfactory performance up to an estimated distance of 1300 m in dusty conditions. Despite the challenging environmental conditions encountered by the transmission network, VLC has shown its capability to transmit high-speed data that satisfies user needs.