An Air Quality Monitoring System with Enhanced Coverage Capabilities by Using the Modulated Scattering Technique (MST)

Conventional air quality monitoring systems based on fixed sensors have sparse coverage and low spatial resolution, which is inadequate to quantify the urban air quality or indoor (industrial and home) air quality. The advancements in low-cost portable air quality sensors have enabled to scale air quality at high resolution thanks to distributed sensors connected with a wireless channel called Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs). However, in the area of air pollution monitoring, low-cost pollution sensors are facing major difficulties with a calibration technique and network re-calibration. The challenge is to ensure the accuracy of low-cost sensors, especially when they are installed in a harsh environment. It can mislead and caused alarming consequences to human health. In this work, we proposed the guidelines to improve the coverage and data quality of sensors by combining the advantages of the modulated scattering technique (MST). The MST sensors not only can improve the communication range but also reduce the devices cost, and harvest power. The proposed system operates in the X band at 10 GHz, which guarantee a reasonable compromise between device dimensions, costs and it has been assessed in a real-time scenario. To ensure the data quality of the sensor, we compared the performances of the proposed system with the data provided by standard state of the art sensors and with the official meteorological and pollution data. The proposed method demonstrates its capabilities in term of coverage and data accuracy.