A fault-tolerant Mobile Sensing Information Gathering Center (MSIGC) using public transport buses to instrument a smart city

Cities are increasingly being instrumented with a wide range of fixed and mobile sensors whose transportation can be more judiciously monitored and managed. The range of rich sensed information can be post-processed. To address this issue, a novel design in which multiple sensors are deployed on Public Transportation Buses (PTBs) that act as on-board Mobile Sensing Information Gathering Centers (MSIGCs) is proposed. MSIGC is used to monitor the outdoor and in-vehicle air quality, the road traffic congestion and to provide guidance concerning public transport selection. The novelty of the MSIGC approach is that it can provide a more comprehensive sensing capability in terms of a distributed deployment of multiple sensors. Furthermore, additional sleep nodes designed as part of the sensor network improve the fault-tolerance of the MSIGC. Finally, the utilization of an embedded system helps to provide a powerful pre-processing capability. The experimental results show that the proposed MSIGC system can meet the need for real-time environment and road traffic monitoring together with providing guidance for passengers.