Mapping WiFi measurements on OpenStreetMap data for Wireless Street Coverage Analysis

Abstract

The growing interest on smart cities and the deployment of an ever increasing number of smart objects in public locations, such as dumpsters, traffic lights, and manholes, requires ubiquitous connectivity for these devices to communicate data and to receive configurations. Opportunistic WiFi connectivity is a valid alternative both to ad hoc solutions, like LoRa, which require costly deployments, and to communicating through the mobile network, which is both pricey and battery power hungry. In this paper we present a tool to analyze the WiFi coverage of home Access Points (AP) on the city streets. It can be of interest to ISP or other providers which want to offer connectivity to Internet of Things smart objects deployed around the city. We describe a method for gathering WiFi measures around the city (by leveraging crowdsourcing) and an open source visualization and analysis web application to explore the accumulated data. More importantly, this framework can leverage the semantic information contained in OpenStreetMap data to extract further knowledge about the AP deployment in the city, for example we investigate the relationship between the AP density per square kilometer within the city and the WiFi street coverage ratio