Abstract-To simulate crowds at mass events, realistic movement data of people is required. Despite their limited capacity for approximating real human mobility, synthetic movement models are traditionally used for this purpose. More realistic simulations can be achieved by using real-life movement data, gathered by observing people in the desired context. This paper presents a method for tracking people at mass events without the need for active cooperation by the subjects. The mechanism works by scanning at multiple locations for packets sent out by the Wi-Fi interface on visitors' smartphones, and correlating the data captured at these different locations. The proposed method can be implemented at very low cost on Raspberry Pi computers. This implementation was trialed in two different contexts: a popular music festival and a university campus. The method allows for tracking thousands of people simultaneously, and achieves a higher coverage rate than similar methods for involuntary crowd tracking. Moreover, the coverage rate is expected to increase even further as more people will start using smartphones. The proposed method has many applications in different domains. It also entails privacy implications that must be considered when deploying a similar system.

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Abstract-Large crowds at music festivals or other mass events create challenging environments for traditional infrastructure based wireless networks. Mobile devices carried by the attendees produce large amounts of network traffic that can result in network outage or serious delays. Opportunistic networks may offer solutions to enable communication between attendees and/or organizers through direct communication between devices, without requiring a fixed infrastructure. In previous work, researchers have developed numerous opportunistic routing protocols designed to enable communication in such ad hoc networks. In this paper, several of these protocols are evaluated for the specific use case of a music festival by running simulations that make use of realistic mobility data collected during an international music festival. This analysis allows for identification of candidate routing protocols that exhibit properties that make them suitable for the envisaged scenario. The goal is to narrow down the set of candidate protocols and to eventually fine tune them to optimize their working. Based on the simulations, we propose two candidate routing protocols that are most suited for use at mass events.