mD-Track: Leveraging Multi-Dimensionality in Passive Indoor Wi-Fi Tracking

TL;DR

mD-Track is a novel Wi-Fi tracking system that fuses multiple dimensions of signal information to achieve high-accuracy, real-time, device-free indoor localization using minimal hardware.

Contribution

It introduces a path separation algorithm and multi-dimensional data fusion to surpass traditional resolution limits in Wi-Fi indoor tracking.

Findings

Achieves high-accuracy passive localization with a single Wi-Fi pair.

Operates in real-time on commodity hardware.

Effective in various indoor environments.

Abstract

Wi-Fi localization and tracking face accuracy limitations dictated by antenna count (for angle-of-arrival methods) and frequency bandwidth (for time-of-arrival methods). This paper presents mD-Track a device-free Wi-Fi tracking system capable of jointly fusing information from as many dimensions as possible to overcome the resolution limit of each individual dimension. Through a novel path separation algorithm, mD-Track can resolve multipath at a much finer-grained resolution, isolating signals reflected off targets of interest. mD-Track can localize human passively at a high accuracy with just a single Wi-Fi transceiver pair. mD-Track also introduces novel methods to greatly streamline its estimation algorithms, achieving real-time operation. We implement mD-Track on both WARP and cheap off-the-shelf commodity Wi-Fi hardware and evaluate its performance in different indoor environments.