  Real-time measurements on the occupancy status of indoor and outdoor spaces
can be exploited in many scenarios (HVAC and lighting system control, building
energy optimization, allocation and reservation of spaces, etc.). Traditional
systems for occupancy estimation rely on environmental sensors (CO2,
temperature, humidity) or video cameras. In this paper, we depart from such
traditional approaches and propose a novel occupancy estimation system which is
based on the capture of Wi-Fi management packets from users' devices. The
system, implemented on a low-cost ESP8266 microcontroller, leverages a
supervised learning model to adapt to different spaces and transmits occupancy
information through the MQTT protocol to a web-based dashboard. Experimental
results demonstrate the validity of the proposed solution in four different
indoor university spaces.
