Evaluation of LoRa-based air pollution monitoring system

Abstract

Air pollution is a threat to human health and the environment. Pollution caused by harmful gases emitted from car exhausts, factories, forest fires and other sources. Carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide are the main elements of air pollution. Serious air pollution may cause harm to our health, thus, a real-time air pollution system to measure existing pollution is needed to classify the pollution level so that appropriate actions can be taken. In a high density area, a big number of sensor nodes are deployed to cover such places and to allow high range communication between nodes and a gateway. This paper presents a real-time and long range air pollution monitoring system for indoor and outdoor environments. The system implemented a wireless sensor network using LoRa technology for data communication between all nodes and sensors. The system consists of three nodes distributed within 900m distance to gateway for measuring the concentration of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide. Experimental results show the system is reliable in both indoor and outdoor applications. The distance coverage achieved up to 900m and can be displayed through a web-based system. The experiment with LoRa transmission has shown that the LoRa technology is very suitable for the air pollution system especially in long range transmission compared to other wireless transmission techniques.