Low cost air pollution monitoring systems: A review of protocols and enabling technologies

Abstract Air pollution is the foremost concern especially in modern cities, because of its noteworthy influences on the community health, and the global economy. The significance of the air quality statistics makes the highly accurate real-time monitoring systems vital. The partial data access, high cost and the non-scalability of conventional air monitoring system enforce the researchers to develop future air pollution monitoring system employing advance technologies such as internet of things (IoT), wireless sensor network (WSN) and the low-cost ambient sensors. This paper presents a short but comprehensive review of these air pollution monitoring systems (APMS), their enabling technologies and protocols. We categorize the recent work into two main classes as static and mobile air monitoring systems based on the carriers of the sensing node and the deployment strategies. Sub categories include, portable monitoring devices, community supported approaches, WSN based systems, and IoT supported approaches. Broad performance assessments and the comparison among these categories were performed with respect to their architecture and the incorporated tools. Furthermore, the present study explored the issues, groundwork, and the methodology of designing a real-time air pollution monitoring system. Finally, the review deliberated the limits of the existing works and summaries the objectives that need to attain in the future air monitoring systems to make them more accurate and realistic.