Crowd Monitoring in Smart Destinations Based on GDPR-Ready Opportunistic RF Scanning and Classification of WiFi Devices to Identify and Classify Visitors’ Origins

Testing and Evaluation of Low-Cost Sensors for Developing Open Smart Campus Systems Based on IoT

Urbanization has led to the need for the intelligent management of various urban challenges, from traffic to energy. In this context, smart campuses and buildings emerge as microcosms of smart cities, offering both opportunities and challenges in technology and communication integration. This study sets itself apart by prioritizing sustainable, adaptable, and reusable solutions through an open-source framework and open data protocols. We utilized the Internet of Things (IoT) and cost-effective sensors to capture real-time data for three different use cases: real-time monitoring of visitor counts, room and parking occupancy, and the collection of environment and climate data. Our analysis revealed that the implementation of the utilized hardware and software combination significantly improved the implementation of open smart campus systems, providing a usable visitor information system for students. Moreover, our focus on data privacy and technological versatility offers valuable insights into real-world applicability and limitations. This study contributes a novel framework that not only drives technological advancements but is also readily adaptable, improvable, and reusable across diverse settings, thereby showcasing the untapped potential of smart, sustainable systems.

Tools for Ground-Truth-Free Passive Client Density Mapping in MAC-Randomized Outdoor WiFi Networks

In the past few years, data privacy legislation has hampered the ability of WiFi network operators to count and map client activity for commercial and security purposes. Indeed, since client device MAC devices are now randomized at each transmission, aggregating client activity using management frames such as Probe Requests, as has been common practice in the past, becomes problematic. Recently, researchers have demonstrated that, statistically, client counts are roughly proportional to raw Probe Request counts, thus somewhat alleviating the client counting problem, even if, in most cases, ground truth measurements from alternate sensors such as cameras are necessary to establish this proportionality. Nevertheless, localizing randomized MAC clients at a network site is currently an unsolved problem. In this work, we propose a set of nine tools for extending the proportionality between client counts and Probe Requests to the mapping of client densities in real-world outdoor WiFi networks without the need for ground truth measurements. The purpose of the proposed toolkit is to transform raw, randomized MAC Probe Request counts into a density map calibrated to an estimated number of clients at each position.

Non-Intrusive Privacy-Preserving Approach for Presence Monitoring Based on WiFi Probe Requests

Monitoring the presence and movements of individuals or crowds in a given area can provide valuable insight into actual behavior patterns and hidden trends. Therefore, it is crucial in areas such as public safety, transportation, urban planning, disaster and crisis management, and mass events organization, both for the adoption of appropriate policies and measures and for the development of advanced services and applications. In this paper, we propose a non-intrusive privacy-preserving detection of people's presence and movement patterns by tracking their carried WiFi-enabled personal devices, using the network management messages transmitted by these devices for their association with the available networks. However, due to privacy regulations, various randomization schemes have been implemented in network management messages to prevent easy discrimination between devices based on their addresses, sequence numbers of messages, data fields, and the amount of data contained in the messages. To this end, we proposed a novel de-randomization method that detects individual devices by grouping similar network management messages and corresponding radio channel characteristics using a novel clustering and matching procedure. The proposed method was first calibrated using a labeled publicly available dataset, which was validated by measurements in a controlled rural and a semi-controlled indoor environment, and finally tested in terms of scalability and accuracy in an uncontrolled crowded urban environment. The results show that the proposed de-randomization method is able to correctly detect more than 96% of the devices from the rural and indoor datasets when validated separately for each device. When the devices are grouped, the accuracy of the method decreases but is still above 70% for rural environments and 80% for indoor environments. The final verification of the non-intrusive, low-cost solution for analyzing the presence and movement patterns of people, which also provides information on clustered data that can be used to analyze the movements of individuals, in an urban environment confirmed the accuracy, scalability and robustness of the method. However, it also revealed some drawbacks in terms of exponential computational complexity and determination and fine-tuning of method parameters, which require further optimization and automation.