IoT deployment for city scale air quality monitoring with Low-Power Wide Area Networks

Air Quality (AQ) is a very topical issue for many cities and has a direct impact on the health of its citizens. We propose to investigate the air quality of a large UK city using low-cost Particulate Matter (PM) micro-sensors, and compare them with government operated air quality stations. In this pilot deployment we design and build six AQ IoT devices, each with four different low-cost PM sensors and deploy them at two locations within the city. These devices are equipped with LoRaWAN wireless network transceivers to test city scale Low-Power WideArea Network network coverage. We conclude that some low-cost PM sensors are viable for monitoring AQ and demonstrate that our device design can be used via LoRaWAN to facilitate more granular city coverage without limitations of network access. Based on these findings we intend to deploy a larger LoRaWAN enabled Air Quality sensor network deployment across the city.