Passive and active techniques for people-counting
AssigneeBluefox, Inc.
InventorsThibault de Lacheze-Murel, Jan Willem Korver, Paul-Ambroise Augustin Duquenne
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Disclosed herein is a people-counting system that counts people in a given area based on the signals that are emitted by the respective people's mobile devices, such as cell phones. In order to count passively, the system receives and analyzes network probes transmitted by the wireless devices and correlates groups of fake machine identifiers in order to identify a given device. Where this passive approach is unsuccessful, or determined low certainty, an active approach involving data layer packets such as: CTS/RTS, authentication and dissociation packets. Device's response or lack thereof is analyzed to provide further accuracy to a local device count.
Claims21
A method of identifying a mobile device via wireless communication comprising:
- passively receiving, by a network sensor, network probes from mobile devices;
- grouping, by the network sensor, network probes that include matching device capabilities and neighboring sequence numbers;
- and
- isolating, by the sensor, a mobile device based on the grouping of network probes.
A system for identifying a mobile device via wireless communication comprising:
- a wireless transceiver configured to passively receive network probes from mobile devices;
- and
- a wireless communications component configured to group network probes that include matching device capabilities and neighboring sequence numbers and identifying a mobile device based on the grouping of network probes.
A method to identify a mobile device seeking wireless networks comprising:
- receiving, by a sensor, network probes emitted by local mobile devices including multiple imitation MAC addresses;
- identifying a make and a model of the mobile device based on the network probes;
- correlating network probes having a same make and model based on a sequence number of the network probes;
- and
- identifying a number of mobile devices within range of the sensor based on a number of correlated groups of network probes.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.