Bulletin of Electrical Engineering and Informatics | 2021
Estimation of the number of people in an indoor environment based onWiFi received signal strength indicator
Abstract
WiFi access points are widely spread everywhere in all our daily life routine. They are available in homes, work, universities, and maybe in every room in a building. Using these devices to provide services other than the Internet is becoming familiar nowadays. One of these services is the estimation of the number of people. This paper conducts an experimental study to estimate the number of people in an indoor environment through two system setups, line of sight, and non-line of sight. The relationship modeling between WiFi received signal and the number of people uses polynomial regression. The experiment comprised of two stages: the first one is the data collection from a controlled number of people. Then, the collected data used to train the system through polynomial regression. The second stage is testing the system s effectiveness by applying it toward an uncontrolled environment. Unlike previous works, in this paper, the system can estimate a large number of people (up to 60) with high accuracy. Testing results revealed efficiency in using WiFi received signal strength to do the people counting because of the accuracy achievements of 93.17% in the line of sight system. The non-line of sight system disclosed randomness in received signal strength indicator value regardless of the change in the number of people. The randomness is mainly caused by the fading effect of the concrete wall that lies between the router and the receiver. Therefore it is inefficient to use the non-line of sight system in such concrete buildings.