Real-time adaptive data filtering with multiple
sensors for indoor monitoring
NOMS 2022-2022 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium | 978-1-6654-0601-7/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/NOMS54207.2022.9789786
Kuon Akiyama and Ryoichi Shinkuma
Faculty of Engineering,
Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan
{al18004, shinkuma}@shibaura-it.ac.jp
Abstract—This demonstration proposes a scheme that sup-
presses the data size of a 3D-image sensing network by adaptively
filtering low-importance points, such as the points of floors and
ceilings when the task is to track pedestrians. The adaptive filter
can be dynamically changed to further reduce the amount of
data if it is difficult for packets to reach the edge computer.
We evaluate the proposed scheme through experiments and
demonstrate that it performs better than benchmark schemes
in terms of prompt arrival of the data.
Index Terms—smart monitoring, LIDAR, 3D image sensing,
adaptive filtering, sensor network
I. I NTRODUCTION
Smart cities are urban platforms that provide citizens with
social public services such as education, medical care, safety,
transportation, and utilities through the use of various informa-
tion and communication technologies [1]. Smart monitoring is
a major component in smart cities that collects information to
manage the infrastructures and resources efficiently [2].
Light detection and ranging (LIDAR) technology has been
utilized to collect three-dimensional (3D) data useful for smart
monitoring [3] [4]. Since the amount of available information
from a single sensor depends highly on its location and the
presence of blind spots caused by obstacles, the installation
of multiple sensors has been discussed [3] [4]. This would
reduce blind spots and increase the amount of information
that could be acquired in the overlapping area of the sensors.
However, the prior works have focused mainly on outdoor
monitoring with a relatively low number of sensors, mostly
for road safety. For outdoor use, four or five sensors can cover
the monitoring area without blind spots, as the sensors can be
placed high. According to [5], four sensors can cover an entire
central intersection. In contrast, for indoor use, ten or more
sensors are required to eliminate blind spots, as the placement
of sensors is limited by ceilings. In addition, the greater the
number of sensors that are used, the more delay and jitter
there will be, since the communication bandwidth will have
to be shared. Using too large a number of sensors may cause
overflow as well.
In light of this background, we demonstrate a scheme that
suppresses the data size of a 3D-image sensing network by
adaptively filtering out low-importance points. It consists of
two main components: a sensor and an edge computer. The
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Jun Shiomi
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology,
Osaka University, Japan
shiomi-jun@ist.osaka-u.ac.jp
Fig. 1. System model.
sensor consists of a sensor and a sensor device that processes
the data acquired by the sensor unit; these are connected
to each other via a local network. The edge computer is a
machine that aggregates the data streams received from the
sensors. The proposed scheme uses a single edge computer
and multiple sensors. Each sensor is connected to the edge
computer. One issue is that, if we use a larger number of
sensors, the system will experience increased latency and
jitter. The edge computer in the proposed scheme performs a
periodic aggregation to adjust the timing of data with various
latency and jitter from each sensor. The sensors in the proposed
scheme filter out low-importance points (e.g., the points of
floors and ceilings in a pedestrian-tracking task) to reduce
the data size adaptively in order to avoid network overflow.
We evaluated the proposed scheme by examining its real-time
packet arrival ratio through software program experiments and
found that is effective. While there have been several prior
studies on 3D-image sensing networks [4] [6], our work differs
in that our proposed scheme uses tens of sensors and performs
adaptive filtering to deal with the difficulty of packets reaching
the edge computer.
II. P ROPOSED SCHEME
A. System model
Fig. 1 shows block diagrams of the 3D-image sensing
network for the proposed scheme. It consists of multiple
sensors and one edge computer. A local network is used to
connect each sensor unit to each sensor device and the sensor
devices to the edge computer.
Each sensor unit sequentially generates streaming data for
each frame and sends it to the sensor device it is connected
to in the form of a user datagram protocol (UDP) packet. The
filter of the sensor device performs filtering for the point-cloud
data. We note that the bandwidth of communication from the
transmitter of the device to the receiver of the edge computer is
strictly limited because it is reasonable that the edge computer
is located separately from devices and is connected to them
via a shared wireless channel.
The merger of the edge computer takes the received data
frames from the storage, and determines the frame that each
received packet belongs to on the basis of the timestamp
information given by each sensor. To accommodate the varying
delay and jitter of packets arriving from sensors, the merger
waits for a while before publishing a frame. Specifically,
it waits until the number of arrived frames waiting to be
published reaches a maximum value for any sensor. Packets
belonging to frames delayed longer than this will be dropped.
The evaluator periodically calculates the delay status for each
sensor. The notifier informs the detector of sensor devices
in response to the delay status. The detector changes the
parameter, used for the filter, on notifications to further reduce
the amount of data sent to the edge computer.
B. Adaptive filtering method
The filter of each sensor device filters out low-importance
points to reduce the data size and avoid network overflow.
The filter obtains the pre-specified importances of each region
of 3D space divided into voxel grids, prioritizes voxel areas
based on their importances, keeps points inside the top n
voxels and removes the points on the outside. The number
of allowed voxels n is initialized as the number of voxels
that have been allocated importance values and is decremented
when the detector is notified by the edge computer to reduce
the data size.
C. Control metric and measurement method
The evaluator of the edge computer periodically evaluates
the state of each sensor by a calculated control metric called
the satisfied delay-requirement ratio (SDRR), which represents
the latencies of UDP packets sent by the sensor. SDRR is
defined as:
1 ∑
m experiment, we evaluated using the pcap files of LIDAR-1 and
SDRR(t) = Rappended (t − i),
m i=1
where t, m, and Rappended (t) are respectively the current
frame number, the number of frames of a single cycle, and
the appended ratio, defined as:
{N
appended (t)
Nexpected (t) Nexpected (t) ̸= 0
Rappended (t) =
0 otherwise
where Nappended (t) represents the number of packets the
edge computer receives at frame t within the satisfied delay
requirement and Nexpected (t) represents the number of packets
that the sensor sends for frame t. Nexpected (t) is set in
accordance with the information on the number of packets
to be transmitted included in each packet transmitted by
the sensor. Nappended (t) may be less than Nexpected (t) due
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(a) vs. frame number (b) Histogram
Fig. 2. Fluctuating SDRR of LIDAR-1 with benchmark.
to packet loss or delay. Packets could be lost during UDP
transmission, or dropped at the merger if the frame latency
is too long (i.e., longer than the period of frames waiting for
being published). If the SDRRs calculated for each m frames
are less than a pre-specified threshold T , the notifier will alert
the corresponding sensors by sending a UDP packet.
III. E VALUATION
A. Reproduction of data sent from sensors
We reproduced a large number of sensor units to evaluate
the proposed scheme. We monitored our laboratory with five
sensors named puck, also called VLP-16, commercialized by
Velodyne [7], and generated a file (pcap file) that captured
network traffic for each sensor. The detailed information is
available on Kaggle [8].
B. Setup for experiment
We evaluated the proposed scheme by doing experiments
with the sensing network virtually. We ran three types of
programs to run: tcpreplay (an open source utility [9]), sensor
device program, and edge computer program. The 3D-image
sensing network consists of 30 sensors and one edge computer.
We used two sets of five NVIDIA Jetson Nano Development
Kits for executing the tcpreplay and sensor device programs,
and one NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX Development Kit for
executing the edge computer program. These machines were
commercialized by NVIDIA [10] [11], and connected by wire.
Data sent from a sensor was reproduced by replaying the
network traffic recorded in the pcap file using tcpreplay. In this
(1) LIDAR-3 which recorded the highest number of points among
the five sensors. The machine for the sensor device ran six
programs in parallel. A unique integer was randomly assigned
for each voxel as importance to these voxels. To reproduce the
strict bandwidth limitation, we used USB 2.0 Ethernet adapter
rather than the one for USB 3.0.
C. Evaluation metric
, (2)
The average SDRR can be used to evaluate the status of the
network since the packet loss or the latencies make this value
low.
D. Benchmark for schemes
We first conducted a benchmark experiment using 30 sen-
sors without executing the filter.
Fig. 2(a) shows the average SDRR for each timing using
the pcap file of LIDAR-1. The average number of points in

Fig. 3. Stably high SDRR of LIDAR-3 with benchmark.
(a) vs. frame number (b) Histogram
Fig. 4. Stably high SDRR of LIDAR-1 with proposed scheme.
the point clouds was as high as 24,573.0. We can see that the
SDRR took various values when the filter was not executed.
The overall average SDRR was approximately 0.7678. The far
ends of the graph were low due to the time lag caused by the
start order of tcpreplay. Fig. 2(b) shows a histogram of the
SDRRs, where we can see that the ratio of packets received
within the satisfied delay requirement was very low in the
benchmark using pcap files of LIDAR-1.
Fig. 3 shows the average SDRR using the pcap file of
LIDAR-3. The average number of points in the point clouds
was 17,699.0, which is 30% less than that of LIDAR-1.
Although the filtering was not executed, the SDRR was high
with an overall average of about 0.9627. This result shows that
when data are from LIDAR-3, the amount is enough small to
be received within the satisfied delay requirement.
E. Results of evaluation
We experimented with a network for the proposed scheme
using 30 sensors while executing the filter, evaluated it using
the two pcap files of LIDAR-1 and LIDAR-3, and compared
it with the results of the corresponding benchmarks.
Fig. 4(a) shows the average SDRR for each timing using the
pcap file of LIDAR-1. The overall average was about 0.9424,
which is higher than that of the benchmark. Fig. 4(b) shows a
histogram of the SDRRs. We can see here that the proposed
scheme receives many more packets with less packet loss and
fewer latencies within the satisfied delay requirement.
Fig. 5 shows the average SDRR of LIDAR-3. The overall
average was about 0.9627. The SDRR remained high because
the amount of data was small, which meant the proposed
Fig. 5. Stably high SDRR of LIDAR-3 with proposed scheme.
NOMS 2022 - 2022 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium
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scheme could turn off the modification of the filter by the de-
tector. Therefore, the proposed scheme receives many packets
with less packet loss and fewer latencies within the satisfied
delay requirement when the modification was not required.
IV. C ONCLUSION
This demonstration paper proposed a scheme that aggregates
data from a large number of sensors and suppresses the amount
of data in real time by filtering points. The sensing network for
the proposed scheme consists of sensors and an edge computer
that are connected via a local network. The filter of the sensor
device works in real time, keeps points inside the pre-specified
voxel regions and removes points on the outside in order
to avoid network overflow. The edge computer periodically
aggregates the data received from multiple sensors, which
accommodates for packet arrival delay and jitter. In addition,
the filter dynamically changes the amount of data when
it is difficult for packets to arrive within a satisfied delay
requirement. We performed experiments by emulating a large
number of sensors and found that the proposed scheme is
effective in that more packets are received within the satisfied
delay requirement.
V. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was supported in part by JST PRESTO no.
JPMJPR1854, JST SBIR-1 no. JPMJST2151, and JSPS KAK-
ENHI no. 21H03427, Japan. The evaluation results were partly
obtained from research commissioned by NICT, Japan.
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