A Variational Bayes Approach to Adaptive Radio Tomography

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Bayesian variational method for adaptive radio tomography that models spatial loss fields with hidden Markov structures, enabling efficient object localization and environmental monitoring.

Contribution

It develops a novel variational Bayes framework for modeling heterogeneous spatial loss fields with adaptive sensor selection, improving radio tomography accuracy.

Findings

Effective SLF reconstruction demonstrated on synthetic data.

Real dataset tests confirm improved localization accuracy.

Efficient computation with affordable complexity.

Abstract

Radio tomographic imaging (RTI) is an emerging technology for localization of physical objects in a geographical area covered by wireless networks. With attenuation measurements collected at spatially distributed sensors, RTI capitalizes on spatial loss fields (SLFs) measuring the absorption of radio frequency waves at spatial locations along the propagation path. These SLFs can be utilized for interference management in wireless communication networks, environmental monitoring, and survivor localization after natural disasters such as earthquakes. Key to the success of RTI is to accurately model shadowing as the weighted line integral of the SLF. To learn the SLF exhibiting statistical heterogeneity induced by spatially diverse environments, the present work develops a Bayesian framework entailing a piecewise homogeneous SLF with an underlying hidden Markov random field model. Utilizing variational Bayes techniques, the novel approach yields efficient field estimators at affordable complexity. A data-adaptive sensor selection strategy is also introduced to collect informative measurements for effective reconstruction of the SLF. Numerical tests using synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach to radio tomography and channel-gain estimation.