How to use wireless networks to sense the environment

Abstract 

Why are researchers trying to integrate sensing functionalities within wireless networks? How can we monitor the environment using radio signals? In this seminar, we will answer these questions, deepening the principles behind the emerging wireless sensing applications and understanding their impact on communication networks.
Wireless networks are becoming the key to the digitalization of society. To give an idea, more than 80% of the Internet traffic is relayed by Wi-Fi with more than 21.1 billion Wi-Fi devices in use worldwide. Wireless devices continuously monitor the way signals are modified when propagating in the environment to properly precode and decode data, compensating for radio channel impairments. This operation is referred to as channel estimation and can be effectively leveraged to design sensing applications that extract information about the environment from multipath channel measurements. Signal processing, and machine and deep learning strategies are adopted for this purpose. Several communication-assisted applications have been proposed by the research community, ranging from human activity recognition, and gesture recognition, to person identification, and people tracking. Moreover, information about the environment can also be used to improve resource allocation in wireless networks (sensing-assisted communications). Given the potential of wireless sensing, the IEEE 802.11 standardization body is working toward standardizing such technology for Wi-Fi through the IEEE 802.11bf task group. This means that wireless sensing may be fully integrated within our Wi-Fi devices soon.

About the Speaker

Francesca Meneghello received her Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering in 2022 from the University of Padova and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Engineering at the same university. Her research interests include deep-learning architectures and signal processing with application to remote radio frequency sensing and wireless networks. She was awarded a Fulbright-Schuman visiting scholar fellowship for the academic year 2022-2023.