On the use of mobile sensors for estimating city-wide pollution levels

Carlos T. Calafate (1) , Bertrand Ducourthial (2, 3, 4)

1 UPV - Universitat Politècnica de València = Universitad Politecnica de Valencia = Polytechnic University of Valencia
2 SU - Sorbonne Université
3 Heudiasyc - Heuristique et Diagnostic des Systèmes Complexes [Compiègne]
4 Labex MS2T - Laboratoire d'Excellence "Maîtrise des Systèmes de Systèmes Technologiques"

Obtaining detailed pollution maps for urban environments is an effort that is gathering much interest by allowing to better regulate traffic and protect citizens from hazardous conditions. However, the scarcity of pollution sensors prevents obtaining the desired degree of detail, requiring alternative solutions to be deployed. In this paper we explore the concept of mobile pollution sensing by studying the feasibility of equipping buses with ozone measurement hardware to estimate ozone patterns for the city of Compiègne. Overall, we achieve accurate estimations, with error values typically ranging from 2% to 10%. Compared to solutions based on deploying static sensors on the different bus stops available, we find that the proposed mobile sensing approach is able to provide a degree of accuracy comparable to deploying tens of static sensors, substantially reducing costs and management.

Mots clés: mobile sensing; pollution; ozone; geostatistics

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Carlos T. Calafate, Bertrand Ducourthial. On the use of mobile sensors for estimating city-wide pollution levels. International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC), Aug 2015, Dubrovnik, Croatia. ⟨10.1109/IWCMC.2015.7289093⟩. ⟨hal-01322566⟩