Toward Massive Scale Air Quality Monitoring

Dangers associated with poor air quality are driving deployments of air quality monitoring technology. These deployments rely on either professional-grade measurement stations or a small number of low-cost sensors integrated into urban infrastructure. In this article, we present a research vision of real-time massive scale air quality sensing that integrates tens of thousands or even millions of air quality sensors to monitor air quality at fine spatial and temporal resolution. We highlight opportunities and challenges of our vision by discussing use cases, key requirements, and reference technologies in order to establish a roadmap on how to realize this vision. We address the feasibility of our vision, introducing a testbed deployment in Helsinki, Finland, and carrying out controlled experiments that address collaborative and opportunistic sensor calibration, a key research challenge for our vision.