1666 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 10, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2010 A Mobile GPRS-Sensors Array for Air Pollution Monitoring A. R. Al-Ali, Member, IEEE, Imran Zualkernan, and Fadi Aloul, Senior Member, IEEE Abstract—An online GPRS-Sensors Array for air pollution monitoring has been designed, implemented, and tested. The proposed system consists of a Mobile Data-Acquisition Unit (Mobile-DAQ) and a fixed Internet-Enabled Pollution Monitoring Server (Pollution-Server). The Mobile-DAQ unit integrates a single-chip microcontroller, air pollution sensors array, a General Packet Radio Service Modem (GPRS-Modem), and a Global Posi- tioning System Module (GPS-Module). The Pollution-Server is a high-end personal computer application server with Internet con- nectivity. The Mobile-DAQ unit gathers air pollutants levels (CO, NO2, and SO2), and packs them in a frame with the GPS physical location, time, and date. The frame is subsequently uploaded to the GPRS-Modem and transmitted to the Pollution-Server via the public mobile network. A database server is attached to the Pol- lution-Server for storing the pollutants level for further usage by various clients such as environment protection agencies, vehicles registration authorities, and tourist and insurance companies. The Pollution-Server is interfaced to Google Maps to display real-time pollutants levels and locations in large metropolitan areas. The system was successfully tested in the city of Sharjah, UAE. The system reports real-time pollutants level and their location on a 24-h/7-day basis. Index Terms—Air pollution, general positioning systems (GPSs), microcontrollers embedded systems, wireless mobile networks. I. INTRODUCTION M ANY air pollution systems in urban and rural areas that utilize smart sensor networks and wireless systems were reported in recent literature. An environmental air pollu- tion monitoring system that measures CO, NO2, and SO2 was reported [1]. The system is based on a smart sensor microcon- verter equipped with a network capable application processor that downloads the pollutants level to a personal computer for further processing. A wearable and wireless sensor system for real-time monitoring of toxic environmental volatile organic compounds was developed in [2]. An air pollution geo-sensor network consisting of 24 sensors and 10 routers was installed to monitor several air pollutants in [3]. The system provides alarm message depending on the detected pollution types in the field. A high-resolution surveillance Web-camera was used to monitor air quality via the Internet [4]. The Web-camera Manuscript received November 25, 2009; accepted March 01, 2010. Date of publication June 10, 2010; date of current version August 04, 2010. This work was supported in part by the American University of Sharjah, UAE. The asso- ciate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was Prof. Giorgio Sberveglieri. The authors are with the Computer Science and Engineering Department, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE (e-mail: aali@aus.edu; izualk- ernan@aus.edu; faloul@aus.edu). Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSEN.2010.2045890 can be connected to network via a wired modem or wireless WiFi connection. A wireless mesh network based on embedded microprocessors consisting of multiple sensors and multihop wireless communication is designed to cover a geographic area in [5]. The system monitors and transmits parameters atmo- spheric environment to a command center. Another wireless sensor network system was developed to monitor indoor air quality in [6]. The indoor environmental parameters were mon- itored and transferred to a client personal computer or personal digital assistant (PDA) using an RF transmitter. An outdoor air pollution monitoring system using ZigBee networks for ubiquitous-cities was reported in [7]. The system integrates a wireless sensor board which employs dust, CO2, temperature, and humidity sensors. The system’s monitoring range is 270 m [7]. An abstract model of a system based on long-range wireless communication was proposed in [8]. Most of the above air pollution and quality monitoring sys- tems are based on sensors that report the pollutants levels to a server via wired modem, router, or short-range wireless ac- cess points. In this paper, we propose a system that integrates a single-chip microcontroller, several air pollution sensors (CO, NO2, SO2), GPRS-Modem, and a general positioning systems (GPSs) module. The integrated unit is a mobile and a wireless data acquisition unit that utilizes the wireless mobile public net- works. The unit can be placed on the top of any moving de- vice such as a public transportation vehicle. While the vehicle is on the move, the microcontroller generates a frame consisting of the acquired air pollutant level from the sensors array and the physical location that is reported from the attached GPS module. The pollutants frame is then uploaded to the General Packet Radio Service Modem (GPRS-Modem) and transmitted to the Pollution-Server via the public mobile network. A data- base server is attached to the Pollution-Server for storing the pollutants level for further usage by interested clients such as environment production agencies, vehicles regeneration author- ities, tourist and insurance companies. The Polution-Server is interfaced to Google maps to display real-time pollutants levels and their locations in large metropolitan area such as Sharjah City, UAE. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II spec- ifies the system functional and nonfunctional requirements. Section III describes system hardware. The software architec- ture is described in Section IV. The results, implementation and testing are reported and discussed in Section V. Finally, the conclusion is presented in Section VI. II. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS A system can be characterized according to its functional and nonfunctional requirements. Functional requirements describe 1530-437X/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE