The high bandwidth available at millimeter-wave frequencies allows for very high data rates, and at the same time enables highly accurate localization and environment sensing. This keynote highlights the practical design aspects of localization and sensing systems, and in particular the challenges of joint communication and sensing. We show how to achieve decimeter-level location accuracy with simple commercial millimeter-wave off-the-shelf communication devices and how sub-6 GHz information can help to further improve the reliability of the system. We also discuss how to use communication hardware to perform zero-cost monitoring of human movement and activities in indoor spaces (rather than using dedicated radars). To this end, access points can be retrofitted to perform radar-like extraction of the tiny micro-Doppler effects caused by human motion. We then use this to achieve fine-grained sensing applications such as simultaneous activity recognition and person identification of multiple human subjects. We will focus on the practical implementation aspects, testbed design and experimental results with such systems.

About Joerg Widmer

Dr. Joerg Widmer is Research Professor and Research Director of IMDEA Networks in Madrid, Spain. Before, he held positions at DOCOMO Euro-Labs in Munich, Germany and EPFL, Switzerland. His research focuses on wireless networks, ranging from extremely high frequency millimeter-wave communication and MAC layer design to mobile network architectures. He authored more than 200 conference and journal papers, 3 IETF RFCs, and 13 patents. He received an ERC consolidator grant, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award of the Humboldt Foundation, a Ramon y Cajal grant, as well as nine best paper awards. He is Fellow of the IEEE and Distinguished Member of the ACM.

This event will be conducted in English