Radio frequency tomography in mobile networks

Networks of portable wireless devices have shown enormous promise in improving communications and sensing capabilities in a large number of important applications. While much work has focused on using specialized sensors to obtain information about the physical environment, we examine the problem of exploiting the received signal strength (RSS) measurements already being used for ad-hoc networking. We describe how information about the shadowing environment is encoded into RSS measurements and present the novel RF Exploitation for Tomographic Imaging and Non-cooperative Analysis (RETINA) algorithm to detect stationary obstacles and track moving objects. We compare this algorithm with existing methods through analysis and simulation and show that RETINA achieves significantly higher accuracy.