The PeRvasive Environment Sensing and Sharing Solution

To stimulate better user behavior and improve environmental and economic sustainability, it is of paramount importance to make citizens effectively aware of the quality of the environment in which they live every day. In particular, we claim that users could significantly benefit from cost-effective efficient Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions that provide them with up-to-date live information about air pollution in the areas where they live, suitably adapted to different situations and with different levels of dynamically selected granularities (e.g., at home/district/city levels). Our PeRvasive Environment Sensing and Sharing (PRESS) project has the ambition of increasing users’ awareness of the natural environment they live in, as a first step towards improved sustainability; the primary target is the efficient provisioning of real-time user-centric information about environmental conditions in the surroundings, and in particular about air pollution. To this purpose, we have designed, implemented, and thoroughly evaluated the PRESS framework, which is capable of achieving good flexibility and scalability while integrating heterogeneous monitoring data, ranging from sensed air pollution to user-provided quality perceptions. Among the elements of technical originality, PRESS exploits extended Kura IoT gateways with novel congestion detection and recovery mechanisms that allow us to optimize bandwidth allocation between in-the-field PRESS components and the cloud. The reported performance results show the feasibility of the proposed solution, by pointing out not only the scalability and efficiency of the adopted message-based solution that uses Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and WebSockets, but also the capability of PRESS to quickly identify and manage traffic congestions, thus, ensuring good quality levels to final users.