IoT Based Multi-Parameter Environmental Monitoring System for Smart Cities

Abstract

In this paper, a cost-effective Internet of Things system for real-time environmental monitoring in smart cities is proposed, which overcomes the limitations that exist in the traditional centralized system. The proposed system is designed to measure the Air Quality Index, Total Dissolved Solids of water, and soil moisture using a BME680 sensor, a TDS sensor, and capacitive sensors, respectively, connected to an ESP32 microcontroller for processing and transmission of data over Wi-Fi to a web interface. This allows public access without the need for any special software and captures the variations in the smart city environment, including the AQI peaks due to traffic. The proposed open-standard system (Wi-Fi, HTTP, JSON) is scalable for smart city implementation and can be extended in the future to include machine learning algorithms for AQI forecasting. Performance analysis of the proposed system using simulated data from Katraj, Pune, shows its sensitivity to both short-term and long-term variations.