Designing a smart city playground: Real-time air quality measurements and visualization in the City of Things testbed

While smart cities have the potential to monitor and control the city in real-time through sensors and actuators, there is still an important road ahead to evolve from isolated smart city experiments to real large-scale deployments. The City of Things testbed, which is a smart city testbed located in the city of Antwerp, Belgium wants to address the underlying research challenges by means of a multi-technology network infrastructure, the capacity to easily perform data experiments on top and a living lab approach to validate the experiments. The demo described in this paper showcases a first use case scenario, visualizing live air quality data that is monitored via sensors installed on top of mobile post vans, driving around in the City of Antwerp. By means of this test demo we will further detail how our generic test bed enables the dynamic integration and support of multiple wireless technologies, novel data processing use cases scenarios as well as the active user panel involvement.