Accurate assessment of air pollution exposure is crucial to better public health. Routine monitoring is done by standardized Air Quality Monitoring (AQM) stations, which are spread thinly due to size and cost. Recent technological developments have made Wireless Distributed Environmental Sensor Networks (WDESNs) that consist of low-cost Micro Sensing Units (MSUs) feasible. These MSUs can be spread more densely and provide higher spatial resolution data. The availability of MSUs, however, poses the challenge of selecting optimal sensors’ locations. Previous attempts assumed prior knowledge on pollution levels in the region of interest, and considered MSUs which measured only one pollutant. This paper presents a scheme for finding an optimal deployment of heterogeneous WDESN, which is based only on MSUs characteristics and land use analysis. To this end, a set of optional deployment locations (OLs) is defined. Each OL is characterized by a set of utilities of placing the various MSUs in that location. The optimization process seeks for the set of locations, under budget and resources constraints, that maximizes the overall utility. Using the suggested method leads to an intelligent deployment under a set of given premises. This is demonstrated vs. a real-world deployment scenario, with multiple types of MSUs.

中文翻译：

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异构空气质量传感器网络的优化部署

准确评估空气污染暴露对于改善公共卫生至关重要。常规监测由标准化的空气质量监测 (AQM) 站完成，由于规模和成本的原因，这些站分布很窄。最近的技术发展使得由低成本微传感单元 (MSU) 组成的无线分布式环境传感器网络 (WDESN) 变得可行。这些 MSU 可以更密集地分布并提供更高的空间分辨率数据。然而，MSU 的可用性带来了选择最佳传感器位置的挑战。之前的尝试假设了对感兴趣区域污染水平的先验知识，并考虑了仅测量一种污染物的 MSU。本文提出了一种仅基于 MSU 特征和土地利用分析的异构 WDESN 最优部署方案。为此，定义了一组可选的部署位置 (OL)。每个 OL 的特点是将各种 MSU 放置在该位置的一组实用程序。优化过程寻求在预算和资源约束下使整体效用最大化的一组位置。使用建议的方法可以在一组给定的前提下进行智能部署。这是相对于具有多种 MSU 类型的真实部署场景进行演示的。