Brief Description of Project:
Air pollution is one
of the most important factors affecting the quality of life and the
health of the increasingly urban population of industrial societies. In
the U.S., all major cities have networks of monitoring stations
measuring the most important pollutants. However, the number of these
stations is usually very small. In the Nashville metropolitan area, for
example, there are ten such stations sparsely covering the central area
of Davidson county. Air pollution is highly location dependent. In
contrast to monitoring methods using stationary stations, a detailed
picture based on real-time data from mobile sensors would offer major
benefits.
We are developing a
prototype Mobile Air Quality Monitoring Network comprised of five sensor
nodes mounted on cars. A sensor node consists of a microcontroller, an
on-board GPS unit and set of gas sensors measuring ozone, CO, and NO2
concentrations. The node is Bluetooth enabled, so it can connect to a
PDA or laptop to upload the measurements. When the car is in motion, the
device samples the sensors every minute and store the results tagged
with a location and time stamp. When the car is parked, the samples are
only taken a few times an hour. When a car is within the coverage area
of an available WiFi hotspot, all data are uploaded to our server,
processed and published on the Microsoft SensorMap portal (http://atom.research.microsoft.com/sensormap/).
A network with five nodes cannot generate a
detailed picture of an entire city. The goal of this project is to
develop a simulation of an urban mobile air quality monitoring sensor
network. We will utilize existing open-source urban traffic simulators
and will add functionality for simulating hundreds of sensor nodes. We
will analyze coverage and monitoring quality, and we will compare our
results with stationary sensors to demonstrate the advantages of the
approach. We will investigate how data collected from a multitude of
nodes can be efficiently published in the Microsoft SensorMap portal.
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A Brief Research Plan (period is for 10 weeks):
1-2: Study the capabilities of the developed mobile
sensor network and learn to use an existing open-source urban traffic
simulator.
3-5: Add functionality to incorporate the sensor
nodes in the simulation and study coverage properties.
5-8: Add functionality to simulate environmental
pollution and study monitoring quality.
8-10: Investigate how collected data can be posted
on the Microsoft SensorMap portal. Write documentation for the developed
software and a report with the research results.
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