Sensing WiFi network for personal IoT analytics

We present the design, implementation and evaluation of an enabling platform for locating and querying physical objects using existing WiFi network. We propose the use of WiFi management probes as a data transport mechanism for physical objects that are tagged with WiFi-enabled accelerometers and are capable of determining their state-of-use based on motion signatures. A local WiFi gateway captures these probes emitted from the connected objects and stores them locally after annotating them with a coarse grained location estimate using a proximity ranging algorithm. External applications can query the aggregated views of state-of-use and location traces of connected objects through a cloud-based query server. We present the technical architecture and algorithms of the proposed platform together with a prototype personal object analytics application and assess the feasibility of our different design decisions. This work makes important contributions by demonstrating that it is possible to build a pure network-based IoT analytics platform with only location and motion signatures of connected objects, and that the WiFi network is the key enabler for the future IoT applications.