This document summarises the results of several research campaigns over the past seven years. The main connecting theme is the physical layer of widely deployed sensors in Pervasive Computing domains. In particular, we have focused on the RF-channel or on ambient audio. The initial problem from which we started this work was that of distributed adaptive transmit beamforming. We have been looking for a simple method to align the phases of jointly transmitting nodes (e.g. sensor or IoT nodes). The algorithmic solution to this problem was to implement a distributed random optimisation method on the participating nodes in which the transmitters and the receiver follow an iterative question-and-answer scheme. We have been able to derive sharp asymptotic bounds on the expected optimisation time of an evolutionary random optimiser and presented an asymptotically optimal approach. One thing that we have learned from the work on these physical layer algorithms was that the signals we work on are fragile and perceptive to physical environmental changes. These could be obstacles such as furniture, opened or closed windows or doors as well as movement of individuals. This observation motivated us to view the wireless interface as a sensor for environmental changes in Pervasive Computing environments. Another use of physical layer RF-signals is for security applications. We are currently working to further push these mentioned directions and novel fields of physical prototyping. In particular, the calculation of mathematical operations on the wireless channel at the time of transmission appears to contain good potential for gains in efficiency for communication and computation in Pervasive Computing domains.
The simultaneous localisation of multiple individuals at the same time was first mentioned and studied by Patwari and Wilson in @cite_121 . The authors derive a statistical model to approximate the position of a person based on RSSI variance which can be extended to multiple persons. This aspect together with the previously untackled problem that environmental changes over time might necessitate frequent calibration of the location system was approached by Zhang and others in @cite_58 . The authors isolate the LoS path by extracting phase information from the differences in the RSS on various frequency spectrums at distributed nodes. Their experimental system is with this approach able to simultaneously and continuously localise up to 5 persons in a changing environment with an accuracy of 1 meter.
@cite_58 @cite_121
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With the technical advances in ubiquitous comput- ing and wireless networking, there has been an increasing need to capture the context information (such as the location) and to figure it into applications. In this paper, we establish the theoreti- cal base and develop a localization algorithm for building a zero- configuration and robust indoor localization and tracking system to support location-based network services and management. The localization algorithm takes as input the on-line measurements of received signal strengths (RSSs) between 802.11 APs and between a client and its neighboring APs, and estimates the location of the client. The on-line RSS measurements among 802.11 APs are used to capture (in real-time) the effects of RF multi-path fading, temperature and humidity variations, opening and closing of doors, furniture relocation, and human mobility on the RSS measurements, and to create, based on the truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) technique, a mapping between the RSS measure and the actual geographical distance. The proposed system requires zero-configuration because the on-line calibration of the effect of wireless physical characteristics on RSS measurement is automated and no on-site survey or initial training is required to bootstrap the system. It is also quite responsive to environmental dynamics, as the impacts of physical characteristics changes have been explicitly figured in the mapping between the RSS measures and the actual geographical distances. We have implemented the proposed system with inexpensive off-the-shelf Wi-Fi hardware and sensory functions of IEEE 802.11, and carried out a detailed empirical study in our division building. The empirical results show the proposed system is quite robust and gives accurate localization results (i.e., with the localization error within 3 meters). Among the various ranging techniques, Radio Signal Strength (RSS) based approaches attract intensive research interests because of its low cost and wide applicability. RSS-based ranging is apt to be affected by the multipath phenomenon which allows the radio signals to reach the destination through multiple propagation paths. To address this issue, previous works try to profile the environment and refer this profile in run-time. In practical dynamic environments, however, the profile frequently changes and the painful retraining is needed. Rather than such static ways of profiling the environments, in this paper, we try to accommodate the environmental dynamics automatically in real-time. The key observation is that given a pair of nodes, the RSS at different spectrum channels will be different. This difference carries the valuable phase information of the radio signals. By analyzing these RSS values, we are able to identify the amplitude of signals solely from the Line-of-Sight (LOS) path. This LOS amplitude is a simple function of the path length (the physical distance). We find that the analysis is a typical non-linear curvature fitting problem that has no general routing algorithms. We prove this problem format is ill-conditioned which has no stable and trustable solutions. To deal with this issue, we further explore the practical considerations for the problem and reform it to a greatly improved conditioning shape. We solve the problem by numerical iterations and implement these ideas in a real-time indoor tracking system called MuD. MuD employs only three TelosB nodes as anchors. The experiment results show that in a dynamic environment where five people move around, the averaged localization error is 1 meter. Compared with the traditional RSS-based approaches in dynamic environment, the accuracy improves up to 10 times. Radio frequency based device-free passive (DfP) localization techniques have shown great potentials in localizing individual human subjects, without requiring them to carry any radio devices. In this study, we extend the DfP technique to count and localize multiple subjects in indoor environments. To address the impact of multipath on indoor radio signals, we adopt a fingerprinting based approach to infer subject locations from observed signal strengths through profiling the environment. When multiple subjects are present, our objective is to use the profiling data collected by a single subject to count and localize multiple subjects without any extra effort. In order to address the non-linearity of the impact of multiple subjects, we propose a successive cancellation based algorithm to iteratively determine the number of subjects. We model indoor human trajectories as a state transition process, exploit indoor human mobility constraints and integrate all information into a conditional random field (CRF) to simultaneously localize multiple subjects. As a result, we call the proposed algorithm SCPL -- sequential counting, parallel localizing. We test SCPL with two different indoor settings, one with size 150 m2 and the other 400 m2. In each setting, we have four different subjects, walking around in the deployed areas, sometimes with overlapping trajectories. Through extensive experimental results, we show that SCPL can count the present subjects with 86 counting percentage when their trajectories are not completely overlapping. Our localization algorithms are also highly accurate, with an average localization error distance of 1.3 m. In this paper, we are interested in counting the total number of people walking in an area based on only WiFi received signal strength indicator (RSSI) measurements between a pair of stationary transmitter receiver antennas. We propose a framework based on understanding two important ways that people leave their signature on the transmitted signal: blocking the line of sight (LOS) and scattering effects. By developing a simple motion model, we first mathematically characterize the impact of the crowd on blocking the LOS. We next probabilistically characterize the impact of the total number of people on the scattering effects and the resulting multipath fading component. By putting the two components together, we then develop a mathematical expression for the probability distribution of the received signal amplitude as a function of the total number of occupants, which will be the base for our estimation using Kullback-Leibler divergence. To confirm our framework, we run extensive indoor and outdoor experiments with up to and including nine people and show that the proposed framework can estimate the total number of people with a good accuracy with only a pair of WiFi cards and the corresponding RSSI measurements.