Role of Campus WiFi Infrastructure for Occupancy Monitoring in a Large University

Wireless infrastructure such as WiFi access points (APs) has grown in popularity while we witness an increased use of wireless smart devices among communities worldwide. Therefore it is desirable to use metadata from the WiFi APs for sensing occupancy as opposed to dedicated physical sensors. In this paper, we (a) compare the performance of WiFi-based occupancy sensing with hardware-based occupancy sensing at room level and then analyze hourly WiFi data across the UNSW campus (b) to understand the applications of occupancy monitoring using WiFi data in a campus environment. Our study explains the feasibility of using WiFi metadata for room-level occupancy estimation by comparing the performance with hardware beam counter sensors while adding insights on how campus communities can benefit from using lightweight WiFi infrastructure for occupancy sensing.