Real time pollution monitoring using Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are gaining importance in the area of research, mainly of their wide potential applications. Atmospheric contamination in the various elements of air leading to hazardous effects of global warming and acid rains which have become a crucial apprehension for the wellness of the population. An atmosphere pollution monitoring system is extremely important to keep away from such adverse imbalance in nature. In the proposed paper, an attempt is made to develop a real-time pollution monitoring using wireless sensor networks (WSN). With the rapid growth in the industries which are the main sources of air pollutants, the problem of air pollution is becoming a serious concern for the health of the population. The concentration of major air pollutant gases like Carbon dioxide (CO₂), Nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen (O₂) from the air are sensed by using the commercially available gas sensors. Each of these sensors is properly calibrated as per the standard methods and these gas sensors are then incorporated with the wireless sensor motes using multi-hop data aggregation algorithm. Air pollutant data are collected from the developed test beds in the form numbers and this data is made available on the Internet through the combination of light weight middleware and a web interface. Air pollution monitoring with Wasp mote is simple and economical due to its features of wireless communication among the sensors.