Using mobile crowd sensing for noise monitoring in smart cities

The Smart City model is capturing a constantly growing interest worldwide, boosted by several drivers. On the one hand, novel Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) disclose promising scenarios to modern cities in terms of innovation, business opportunities and life-quality improvement. On the other hand, increasing requirements on urban resources (e.g., transportation systems, energy consumption and environmental sustainability) pose severe threats to urban infrastructures. One of the possible ways for tackling these challenges is to offer both citizenship and city managers new ways for managing environmental monitoring. Therefore, in this paper we present a Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) platform exploiting smartphone's built-in microphones as sound sensing devices for creating large-scale noise maps and for suggesting city managers suitable noise reduction interventions. Platform architectural and physical components are thoroughly described along with the developed apps. Results from our test site in Southern Italy are presented and discussed, in order to assess how mobile devices can be effectively used as sensing nodes within a Smart City.