Octopus: a practical and versatile wideband MIMO sensing platform

Abstract

Radio frequency (RF) technologies have achieved a great success in data communication. In recent years, pervasive RF signals are further exploited for sensing; RF sensing has since attracted attentions from both academia and industry. Existing developments mainly employ commodity Wi-Fi hardware or rely on sophisticated SDR platforms. While promising in many aspects, there still remains a gap between lab prototypes and real-life deployments. On one hand, due to its narrow bandwidth and communication-oriented design, Wi-Fi sensing offers a coarse sensing granularity and its performance is very unstable in harsh real-world environments. On the other hand, SDR-based designs may hardly be adopted in practice due to its large size and high cost. To this end, we propose, design, and implement Octopus, a compact and flexible wideband MIMO sensing platform, built using commercial-grade low-power impulse radio. Octopus provides a standalone and fully programmable RF sensing solution; it allows for quick algorithm design and application development, and it specifically leverages the wideband radio to achieve a competent and robust performance in practice. We evaluate the performance of Octopus via micro-benchmarking, and further demonstrate its applicability using representative RF sensing applications, including passive localization, vibration sensing, and human/object imaging.