Rethinking Quality Metrics for Low-Cost Urban Environmental Sensor Networks

Dense, low-cost sensor networks can monitor environmental hazards that urban residents are exposed to and that are not always captured by sparsely distributed regulatory monitors. However, knowing where to place sensor nodes in a city remains an open research question, making it difficult to deploy the networks. Network designers generally optimize for area coverage, which does not account for the three-dimensional or social and political nature of cities. Thus, there is a need for new evaluation metrics that network designers can optimize for when deploying urban environmental sensor networks. My PhD thesis addresses this need by proposing new quality metrics that focus on key features needed for successful real-world deployments, including reliability, maintainability, social equity, and certainty of data. This work will help increase the deployment of real-world sensor network deployments by helping cities and network designers see the values of different optimization metrics with the real-world trade-offs, making it easier to determine where to place nodes and how to address the multifaceted needs of cities.