IoT Based Framework for Air Pollution Monitoring in Smart Cities

Awareness of air pollution is one of the key aspects of modern smart cities. Policy makers, and other key stakeholders, are often ignorant of pollution in their immediate surrounding and its correlation to local environment and micro-climate when making short- or long-term decisions. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm provides a suitable general framework for monitoring air pollution as it incorporates a sensor network containing static and/or mobile sensors for measuring the different pollutants. IoT architectures, although very powerful, have a lot of issues and challenges that need to be addressed and in turn solved. In this paper a comprehensive summary of current trends in air pollution monitoring is presented. Considering the advantages of the existing solutions, a novel holistic air pollution monitoring architecture is proposed. A detailed analysis of its components is provided, including their characteristics, objectives and mechanisms to overcome the major issues and challenges.