Crowd Size using CommSense Instrument for COVID-19 Echo Period

TL;DR

This paper introduces LTE-CommSense, a passive, cost-effective system for estimating outdoor crowd sizes during the COVID-19 Echo-period, leveraging existing LTE signals without active transmission or personal data collection.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel LTE-based sensing system for non-intrusive outdoor crowd estimation, demonstrating its feasibility with practical data.

Findings

System can distinguish between empty and crowded environments.

Accurate estimation of crowd size in outdoor settings.

Passive LTE signal analysis is effective for crowd monitoring.

Abstract

The period after the COVID-19 wave is called the Echo-period. Estimation of crowd size in an outdoor environment is essential in the Echo-period. Making a simple and flexible working system for the same is the need of the hour. This article proposes and evaluates a non-intrusive, passive, and costeffective solution for crowd size estimation in an outdoor environment. We call the proposed system as LTE communication infrastructure based environment sensing or LTE-CommSense. This system does not need any active signal transmission as it uses LTE transmitted signal. So, this is a power-efficient, simple low footprint device. Importantly, the personal identity of the people in the crowd can not be obtained using this method. First, the system uses practical data to determine whether the outdoor environment is empty or not. If not, it tries to estimate the number of people occupying the near range locality. Performance evaluation with practical data confirms the feasibility of this proposed approach.