First experiences using wireless sensor networks for noise pollution monitoring

Abstract

The assessment of environmental pollution levels is a complex and expensive task that public administration and often also private entities are willing or forced to take over. Focusing on the assessment of environmental noise pollution in urban areas, we provide qualitative considerations and experimental results to show the feasibility of wireless sensor networks to be used in this context. We present a prototype for the collection and logging of noise pollution data based on the Tmote invent prototyping platform, using which we performed indoor and outdoor noise pollution measurements. We build upon these first experimental results to depict the potentials and limits of currently available wireless sensor networks prototyping platforms to be used as noise pollution sensors. Furthermore, we present tinyLAB, a Matlab-based tool developed in the context of this work, which enables real-time acquisition, processing and visualization of data collected in wireless sensor networks.