Solutions for SmartCities: proposal of a monitoring system of air quality based on a LoRaWAN network with low-cost sensors

The continuous exposure to high levels of atmospheric pollution can cause harmful effects on the population health and environment. Technology advances in communication networks and air pollution sensors allow the development of low-cost systems for the management of the air quality in cities. The deployment of a large number of sensors provides a better geographic and temporal resolution, and it complements the traditional monitoring networks. In this work, we present an experience in the city of La Plata, Argentina, where an air quality monitoring system for urban areas was assembled. This system is based on a LoRaWAN network, and uses free hardware and software environments. All the sensed information is transmitted to a scalable platform for IoT in the cloud, where we can process the received data, monitor the network state and generate statistics. In this first experience, we test 3 different models of sensors (Nova SDS011, Nova SDS021 y SHINYEI PPD42) in combination with a low volume sampler of particulate matter, MiniVol TAS Airmetrics. The results obtained until the moment provide a contribution to the construction of future Smart Cities.