Are You in the Line? RSSI-based Queue Detection in Crowds

Crowd behaviour analytics focuses on behavioural characteristics of groups of people instead of individuals' activities. This work considers human queuing behaviour which is a specific crowd behavior of groups. We design a plug-and-play system solution to the queue detection problem based on Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) received signal strength indicators (RSSIs) captured by multiple signal sniffers. The goal of this work is to determine if a device is in the queue based on only RSSIs. The key idea is to extract features not only from individual device's data but also mobility similarity between data from multiple devices and mobility correlation observed by multiple sniffers. Thus, we propose single-device feature extraction, cross-device feature extraction, and cross-sniffer feature extraction for model training and classification. We systematically conduct experiments with simulated queue movements to study the detection accuracy. Finally, we compare our signal-based approach against camera-based face detection approach in a real-world social event with a real human queue. The experimental results indicate that our approach can reach minimum accuracy of 77% and it significantly outperforms the camera-based face detection because people block each other's visibility whereas wireless signals can be detected without blocking.Comment: This work has been partially funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme within the project "Worldwide Interoperability for SEmantics IoT" under grant agreement Number 72315

Group-In: Group Inference from Wireless Traces of Mobile Devices

This paper proposes Group-In, a wireless scanning system to detect static or mobile people groups in indoor or outdoor environments. Group-In collects only wireless traces from the Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices for group inference. The key problem addressed in this work is to detect not only static groups but also moving groups with a multi-phased approach based only noisy wireless Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSIs) observed by multiple wireless scanners without localization support. We propose new centralized and decentralized schemes to process the sparse and noisy wireless data, and leverage graph-based clustering techniques for group detection from short-term and long-term aspects. Group-In provides two outcomes: 1) group detection in short time intervals such as two minutes and 2) long-term linkages such as a month. To verify the performance, we conduct two experimental studies. One consists of 27 controlled scenarios in the lab environments. The other is a real-world scenario where we place Bluetooth scanners in an office environment, and employees carry beacons for more than one month. Both the controlled and real-world experiments result in high accuracy group detection in short time intervals and sampling liberties in terms of the Jaccard index and pairwise similarity coefficient.Comment: This work has been funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme under Grant Agreements No. 731993 AUTOPILOT and No.871249 LOCUS projects. The content of this paper does not reflect the official opinion of the EU. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the authors. Proc. of ACM/IEEE IPSN'20, 202

Together or Alone: Detecting Group Mobility with Wireless Fingerprints

This paper proposes a novel approach for detecting groups of people that walk "together" (group mobility) as well as the people who walk "alone" (individual movements) using wireless signals. We exploit multiple wireless sniffers to pervasively collect human mobility data from people with mobile devices and identify similarities and the group mobility based on the wireless fingerprints. We propose a method which initially converts the wireless packets collected by the sniffers into people's wireless fingerprints. The method then determines group mobility by finding the statuses of people at certain times (dynamic/static) and the space correlation of dynamic people. To evaluate the feasibility of our approach, we conduct real world experiments by collecting data from 10 participants carrying Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons in an office environment for a two-week period. The proposed approach captures space correlation with 95% and group mobility with 79% accuracies on average. With the proposed approach we successfully 1) detect the groups and individual movements and 2) generate social networks based on the group mobility characteristics.Comment: This work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme within the project "Worldwide Interoperability for SEmantics IoT" under grant agreement Number 72315

Embracing the future Internet of Things

All of the objects in the real world are envisioned to be connected and/or represented, through an infrastructure layer, in the virtual world of the Internet, becoming Things with status information. Services are then using the available data from this Internet-of-Things (IoT) for various social and economical benefits which explain its extreme broad usage in very heterogeneous fields. Domain administrations of diverse areas of application developed and deployed their own IoT systems and services following disparate standards and architecture approaches that created a fragmentation of things, infrastructures and services in vertical IoT silos. Coordination and cooperation among IoT systems are the keys to build “smarter” IoT services boosting the benefits magnitude. This article analyses the technical trends of the future IoT world based on the current limitations of the IoT systems and the capability requirements. We propose a hyper-connected IoT framework in which “things” are connected to multiple interdependent services and describe how this framework enables the development of future applications. Moreover, we discuss the major limitations in today’s IoT and highlight the required capabilities in the future. We illustrate this global vision with the help of two concrete instances of the hyper-connected IoT in smart cities and autonomous driving scenarios. Finally, we analyse the trends in the number of connected “things” and point out open issues and future challenges. The proposed hyper-connected IoT framework is meant to scale the benefits of IoT from local to global

Toward understanding crowd mobility in smart cities through the Internet of Things

Understanding crowd mobility behaviors would be a key enabler for crowd management in smart cities, benefiting various sectors such as public safety, tourism and transportation. This article discusses the existing challenges and the recent advances to overcome them and allow sharing information across stakeholders of crowd management through Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The article proposes the usage of the new federated interoperable semantic IoT platform (FIESTA-IoT), which is considered as "a system of systems". The platform can support various IoT applications for crowd management in smart cities. In particular, the article discusses two integrated IoT systems for crowd mobility: 1) Crowd Mobility Analytics System, 2) Crowd Counting and Location System (from the SmartSantander testbed). Pilot studies are conducted in Gold Coast, Australia and Santander, Spain to fulfill various requirements such as providing online and offline crowd mobility analyses with various sensors in different regions. The analyses provided by these systems are shared across applications in order to provide insights and support crowd management in smart city environments.The pilot study in Gold Coast is conducted in collaboration with NEC Australia. This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Government (MINECO) under Grant Agreement No. TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R ADVICE (Dynamic Provisioning of Connectivity in High Density 5G Wireless Scenarios) project and by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme under Grant Agreements No. 731993 AUTOPILOT (Automated Driving Progressed by Internet Of Things), 643943 FIESTAIoT (Federated Interoperable Semantic IoT Testbeds and Applications), and 643275 FESTIVAL (Federated Interoperable Smart ICT Services Development and Testing Platforms) projects and the joint project by NEC Laboratories Europe and Technische Universität Dortmund. The content of this paper does not reflect the official opinion of the Spanish Government or European Union. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the authors

Enabling data spaces : existing developments and challenges

This paper focuses on the concept of data spaces, which can serve as a basis for the future data economy. In data spaces, applicable to various business domains, stakeholders will be able to share data with each other in a controlled way. First, the paper describes the real motivations and needs for enabling data spaces. Second, it highlights the major technical developments in the area of data spaces in the light of open ecosystems and standards. Lastly, it focuses on two key challenges for enabling data spaces: 1) Data interoperability, 2) Data value generation. As a concrete data spaces solution example, this paper proposes the "Green Twin" use case that can be developed as a carbon neutrality solution in the domains of mobility and smart cities

Tracking Pedestrians And Emergent Events In Disaster Areas

Most of the existing research on emergency evacuation strategies focus on city evacuation planning that highly depends on the use of vehicles or evacuation from buildings. However, for large areas with limited use of vehicles such as theme parks, evacuation of pedestrians and emergent events must be tracked for safety reasons. As hazards may cause certain damages to services, networks with disaster resilience are needed to achieve mission-critical operations such as search and rescue. In this paper, we develop a method for tracking pedestrians and emergent events during disasters by opportunistic ad hoc communication. In our network model, smart-phones of pedestrians store and carry messages to a limited number of mobile sinks. Mobile sinks are responsible for communicating with smart-phones and reaching the emergent events effectively. Since the positioning of the mobile sinks has a direct impact to the network performance, we propose physical force based (PF), grid allocation based (GA) and road allocation based (RA) approaches for sink placement and mobility. The proposed approaches are analyzed through extensive network simulations using real theme park maps and a human mobility model for disaster scenarios. The simulation results show that the proposed approaches achieve significantly better network coverage and higher rescue success without producing increased communication overhead compared to two random mobile sink movement models