Measuring and Understanding Opportunistic Co-presence Patterns in Smart Office Spaces

This paper presents the outcomes of a study that examines human interactions and mobility patterns in indoor spaces such as office environments. To this purpose, Bluetooth and IEEE 802.15.4-based fine grained traces have been collected through an extensive experimental measurement campaign in a heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) test bed, deployed in a real-life office environment. An initial analysis of these traces provides deeper insights into the encounter characteristics between human-held devices and human-held and static infrastructure devices. The study shows that due to lack of granularity, existing traces and the derived works, often neglect a significant portion of shorter-lived contacts that can be exploited for opportunistic communication. The presented findings also confirm that contact opportunities between mobile devices derived from observations of infrastructure devices can introduce significant errors into the modeling of such encounters. We believe that our traces and the derived models, together with our initial findings, are useful for the research community in supporting the design of future IoT solutions in such environments.