Reference-free amplitude-based WiFi passive sensing

The parasitic exploitation of WiFi signals for passive sensing purposes is a topic that is attracting considerable interest in the scientific community. In an attempt at meeting the requirements for sensor compactness, easy deployment, and low cost, we resort to a non-coherent signal processing scheme that does not rely on the availability of a reference signal and relaxes the constraints on the sensor hardware implementation. Specifically, with the proposed strategy, the presence of a moving target echo is determined by detecting the amplitude modulation that it produces on the direct signal transmitted from the WiFi access point. We investigate the target discrimination capability of the resulting sensor against the competing interference background and we theoretically characterize the impact of undesired amplitude fluctuations in the received signal that are determined by causes other than the superposition of the target echo, thereby including the waveform properties. Hence, we propose different solutions to address the limitations identified, characterized by different complexities, and we investigate their advantages and drawbacks. The conceived signal processing schemes are thoroughly validated on both simulated and experimental data, collected in different operational scenarios.