City Veins

By deploying such sensors on service vehicles that routinely navigate through city streets, we create a dynamic sensing network that comprehensively and efficiently monitor the urban environment. The drive-by sensing approach developed in City Scanner, complements stationary environmental monitors by providing a flexible and scalable solution with lower deployment and maintenance costs.

Although drive-by sensing offers substantial advantages over traditional urban sensing methods, the data sampling frequency and spatial granularity of measurements are constrained by factors such as street topology and mobility patterns of sensor-equipped vehicles. In City Veins we propose a solution that considers the street network topology and investigates its effect on the quality of data. We also study the temporal aspects of drive-by-sensing approach, using a temporal decaying function that might vary for different environmental properties (air quality information has a higher temporal sensitivy than the road quality, for instance). Combining the street topology, the temporal decaying function of environmental data, and the vehicle routes, City Veins measures the sensing potential of cities.