Evolving Air Pollution Monitoring Systems for Green 5G: From Cloud to Edge

The incessant urbanization and growth in industry and technology have been deteriorating the quality of air. Ongoing industrial and technological developments have disrupted the ecological balance. This makes air pollution monitoring a necessity in the evolutionary 5G era. As conventional systems for monitoring the air quality are expensive, smart monitoring systems are gaining insight. In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), with bulk of data being generated and stored, the multi-access edge computing (MEC) paradigm has been identified as a key solution. This paper provides a survey of the existing air pollution monitoring systems, and identifies the importance of computing at the edge, i.e. MEC, in these systems. Some ongoing projects in this field, and the challenges being faced by the research community are also identified. Such solutions can be a contributor to green communication in 5G and beyond wireless communication networks. Future research directions in the field of air pollution monitoring have also been identified.