Optimal WSN Deployment Models for Air Pollution Monitoring

Air pollution has become a major issue in the modern megalopolis because of industrial emissions and increasing urbanization along with traffic jams and the heating/cooling of buildings. Monitoring urban air quality is therefore required by municipalities and the civil society. Current monitoring systems rely on reference sensing stations that are precise but massive, costly, and, therefore, seldom. In this paper, we focus on an alternative or complementary approach, with a network of low cost and autonomic wireless sensors, aiming at a finer spatiotemporal granularity of sensing. Generic deployment models in the literature are not adapted to the stochastic nature of pollution sensing. Our main contribution is to design integer linear programming models that compute sensor deployments capturing both the coverage of pollution under time-varying weather conditions and the connectivity of the infrastructure. We evaluate our deployment models on a real data set of Greater London. We analyze the performance of the proposed models and show that our joint coverage and connectivity formulation is tight and compact, with a reasonable enough execution time. We also conduct extensive simulations to derive engineering insights for effective deployments of air pollution sensors in an urban environment.