Air quality monitoring over Lorawan

Abstract

Indoor air quality (IAQ) is an essential factor for ensuring the health, safety and comfort of people. IAQ can be evaluated by physical factors like dust particles, chemical or gaseous pollutants (including carbon monoxide, oxygen, and volatile organic compounds) and biological factors like molds and bacteria growth that greatly depend on temperature and humidity of a room. Understanding, monitoring and controlling these common pollutants indoors can help reduce significantly the negative effects to people’s health as well as indoor working environment. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a system for real-time air quality monitoring. In this study, a sensor node and web-based system for monitoring indoor air quality is presented. The system has been developed to monitor in real time the environmental parameters of air quality. Specially, the framework of sensor network for monitoring IAQ is explained where sensor nodes are physically distributed and Low Power Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is used to exchange system information. LoRa signifies long range and low power wireless platform that is prevailing technology choice for building (Internet of Things) IoT networks worldwide. According to a theory, LoRa technology and LoRaWAN protocol provide numerous features like extending battery lifetime up to 20 years, providing deep penetration in dense urban or indoor regions and transmitting in rural areas up to 40 kilometers away. Generally, we developed successfully the system consists of a sensor node and a website. The sensor node acting as an end device includes gaseous sensors, temperature and humidity sensors, particle dust sensor and LoRa module - a wireless transmitter. The website is similar to an application server for receiving measured data from sensors and then evaluating the IAQ index. Additionally, it is able to log the collected data using a self-developed server program which can be easily accessed through web browser or smartphone. The following contents of this study is going to explain and clarify what it is being done in the project as well as how the system is constructed.