An open platform for distributed urban noise monitoring

Urban noise is an ever-present issue; it is the public administration's responsibility to mitigate noise and deal with complaints. However, assessing noise levels is nontrivial and there are no established tools for holistically monitoring, evaluating, managing, and planning urban noise across, e.g., a city quarter, in a qualified manner. It is the objective of an ongoing smart cities research project, “StadtLärm”, to develop a system for monitoring noise, visualizing it in 3D using spatial noise models, and automatically recognizing predefined scenes and events through classification. The system being developed is built on a platform based on the MQTT protocol. This paper discusses the system's overall and MQTT communications architecture, highlighting advantages of the approach and specific aspects of its realization.