Work place: Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Adi Shankara Institute of Engineering and Technology, Kalady, India
E-mail: ajay.ec@adishankara.ac.in
Website: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6048-5025
Research Interests:
Biography
Dr. Ajay Kumar has been working as an Associate Professor in the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering at ASIET since January 2011. He holds a PhD degree from APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University, Thiruvananthapuram, and completed his Bachelor's degree in ECE from Anna University in 2007, followed by a Master's degree in Communication Systems from the same university in 2011.His research interests lie in the areas of Internet of Things, Low Power Lossy Networks, Energy Efficient IoT Networks, and Wireless Sensor Networks. With more than 13 years of teaching experience, Dr. Ajay has conducted expert classes and workshops on network simulator tools and has actively participated in several workshops, conferences, and research publications.
By Ajay Kumar P. V. Rajaraman Albins Paul Hasna Hameed
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijem.2026.04.13, Pub. Date: 8 Aug. 2026
Accurate air quality mapping in regions with sparse sensor deployment remains a challenge due to high infrastructure costs. While modern literature increasingly favors heavy, cloud-based Artificial Intelligence frameworks that assume dense input networks, the operational boundaries and mathematical fidelity of lean, edge-computed spatial interpolation models in ultra-sparse (e.g., 5-node) live frameworks remain poorly defined. This work presents a case-study comparative evaluation of conventional spatial interpolation techniques for estimating pollutant concentrations in sensor-limited environments. Eight interpolation methods, namely Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW), Kriging, Empirical Bayesian Kriging (EBK), Radial Basis Function (RBF), Nearest Neighbor (NN), Akima, Piecewise Cubic Hermite Interpolation (PCHIP), and Cubic Spline (CS), were analyzed using real-time environmental data collected from five locations in Kalady, Kerala, India. The interpolation performance was evaluated using RMSE and MAE metrics through leave-one-out validation. Results indicate that, within this deployment, Kriging and IDW achieved the best estimation accuracy for PM2.5, PM10, humidity, and temperature compared to the other methods evaluated. A LoRa-based sensing framework was also integrated to support low-power real-time environmental monitoring. As a single-region case study based on five monitoring nodes, the findings are specific to this deployment, and broader validation across additional stations and regions is identified as future work. The proposed approach demonstrates the feasibility of resource-efficient air quality estimation in regions with limited monitoring infrastructure.
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