Cloud Native Approach to the Implementation of an Environmental Monitoring System for Smart City Based on IoT Devices

In this paper, we present the architecture and implementation of the environmental monitoring system, which is one of the main elements of the Smart City system, deployed in a small town in Poland – Boguchwała, Podkarpacie. The system is based on the Internet of Things devices and Cloud Native techniques, which allow for measuring several environmental parameters like pollution, EMF pollution, and acoustic threats. In addition to these parameters, characteristic of environmental monitoring, the system has been enhanced with video monitoring techniques, such as evaluating the traffic intensity on the main roads and crowd detection. In particular, a front-end application was implemented to visualize the results on a city map. The system is deployed on Raspberry Pi and NVidia Jetson using Kubernetes as resources orchestrator. We managed to design, implement, and deploy a system that makes measurements and predicts the parameters indicated. The proposed solution has no significant impact on the energy consumption of the measuring stations while increasing the scalability and extensibility of the system.