Pushing Bistatic Wireless Sensing toward High Accuracy at the Sub-Wavelength Scale

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for high-precision, contactless wireless sensing that overcomes phase offset issues in bistatic systems, enabling sub-wavelength displacement detection with significantly improved accuracy.

Contribution

It presents the first quantitative mapping between distorted and ideal channel features, enabling sub-wavelength sensing in bistatic wireless systems.

Findings

Achieves nearly tenfold improvement in displacement accuracy.

Successfully reconstructs sub-wavelength details in real-world Wi-Fi and LoRa experiments.

Overcomes phase offset limitations of existing channel ratio methods.

Abstract

Contactless sensing using wireless communication signals has garnered significant attention due to its non-intrusive nature and ubiquitous infrastructure. Despite the promise, the inherent bistatic deployment of wireless communication introduces clock asynchronism, which leads to unknown phase offsets in channel response and hinders fine-grained sensing. State-of-the-art systems widely adopt the cross-antenna channel ratio to cancel these detrimental phase offsets. However, the channel ratio preserves sensing feature accuracy only at integer-wavelength target displacements, losing sub-wavelength fidelity. To overcome this limitation, we derive the first quantitative mapping between the distorted ratio feature and the ideal channel feature. Building on this foundation, we develop a robust framework that leverages channel response amplitude to recover the ideal channel feature from the distorted ratio. Real-world experiments across Wi-Fi and LoRa demonstrate that our method can effectively reconstruct sub-wavelength displacement details, achieving nearly an order-of-magnitude improvement in accuracy.