Weather of the Dorm WIFI Ecosystem at the University of Colorado Boulder for Fall Semester 2019 to Spring Semester 2020 a Case Study of WIFI and a Campus Response to the COVID-19 Perturbation

TL;DR

This study models campus WIFI network behavior as a weather system using Singular Spectrum Analysis, revealing how campus activity patterns changed during COVID-19 disruptions and demonstrating the method's forecasting capabilities and limitations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach of applying weather analogy and SSA to analyze and forecast campus WIFI ecosystem dynamics, especially during COVID-19 perturbation.

Findings

WIFI behavior can be modeled as a low-dimensional dynamical system.

SSA effectively forecasted WIFI patterns before COVID-19 disruptions.

Forecasting accuracy declined during COVID-19 shock, highlighting the impact of abrupt changes.

Abstract

Growing use of network technology in Higher Education means that there has been increasing demand to adapt technology platforms and tools that transform student learning strategies, faculty teaching, research modalities, as well as general operations. Many of the new modalities are necessary for IHE business. In August 2019, we began collecting and analyzing data from the campus WIFI network. A goal of the research was to answer question like what passive sensing of the IHE WIFI might tell us about the dynamics of the WIFI weather in the IHE ecosystem and what does anonymized data tell us about the IHE ecosystem. The analogy with weather prediction seemed appropriate and a viable approach. Starting Fall 2019, data were collected in the observational phase. In the analysis phase, we applied Singular Spectrum Analysis decomposition, to deconstruct WIFI data from dorms, the central campus dining cafeteria, the recreation center, and other buildings on campus. That analysis led to the identification of clusters of buildings that behaved similarly. Just as in the case of models of the weather, a final component of this research was forecasting. We found that weekly forecast of WIFI behavior in the Fall 2019, were straight forward using SSA and seemed to present behavior of a low dimensional dynamical system. However, in Spring 2020, and the COVID perturbation, the campus ecosystem received a shock and data show that the campus changed very quickly. We found that as the campus moved to conduct remote learning, teaching, the closure of research labs, and the edict to work remotely, SSA forecasting techniques not trained on the Spring 2020, data after the shock, performed poorly. While SSA forecasting trained on a portion of the data did better.