Radio-based trail usage monitoring with low-end motes

Outdoor automated people counting is essential to the proper management of recreational and protected areas. We present a solution for radio-based people counting that employs low-end motes to detect the signature of shadowing events left by humans on the RF signal as they interrupt the line-of-sight path between a radio transmitter and a receiver. Our solution can be implemented with devices with a reduced form factor, requires little computing power, and provides a satisfactory performance at a low energy cost. We illustrate our implementation on TelosB nodes and present an extensive set of results from a real-world deployment.