Non-intrusive occupancy sensing in commercial buildings

Abstract

Buildings accounted for half of global electricity consumption in recent years. Accurate occupancy information could improve the energy efficiency and reduce the energy consumption in built environment. Although prior studies have explored various sensing techniques for occupancy sensing, these solutions still suffer from serious drawbacks, e.g. their estimated occupancy information is coarse, extra infrastructure is required, and the privacy of occupants is exposed. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a novel and practical occupancy sensing system, WinOSS, which is able to provide fine-grained occupancy information thoroughly by leveraging existing commodity WiFi infrastructure along with the WiFi-enabled mobile devices carried by occupants. We have implemented WinOSS in a 1500m2 built environment for four weeks to validate its performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that WinOSS outperforms existing occupancy sensing techniques, and provides comprehensive fine-grained occupancy information (including occupancy detection, counting and tracking) in an accurate, reliable, cost-effective and non-intrusive manner.