User Localization using RF Sensing: A Performance comparison between LIS and mmWave Radars

TL;DR

This paper compares the performance of Large Intelligent Surfaces (LIS) and mmWave radars for RF-based localization, highlighting the radar's higher accuracy and LIS's additional communication capabilities.

Contribution

The study provides a comparative analysis of LIS and mmWave radars for localization, including real-world and simulated experiments, which is novel in evaluating their relative performance.

Findings

mmWave radar achieves 0.71 IOU and 3cm error

LIS achieves 0.56 IOU and 10cm error

Radar outperforms LIS in accuracy

Abstract

Since electromagnetic signals are omnipresent, Radio Frequency (RF)-sensing has the potential to become a universal sensing mechanism with applications in localization, smart-home, retail, gesture recognition, intrusion detection, etc. Two emerging technologies in RF-sensing, namely sensing through Large Intelligent Surfaces (LISs) and mmWave Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radars, have been successfully applied to a wide range of applications. In this work, we compare LIS and mmWave radars for localization in real-world and simulated environments. In our experiments, the mmWave radar achieves 0.71 Intersection Over Union (IOU) and 3cm error for bounding boxes, while LIS has 0.56 IOU and 10cm distance error. Although the radar outperforms the LIS in terms of accuracy, LIS features additional applications in communication in addition to sensing scenarios.