Millimeter-Wave Joint Communication and Sensing

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 achieved 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 the 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.

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. He was a visiting researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, USA, University College London, UK, and TU Darmstadt, Germany. His research focuses on wireless networks, ranging from extremely high frequency millimeter-wave communication and MAC layer design to mobile network architectures. Joerg Widmer authored more than 200 conference and journal papers and three IETF RFCs, and holds 14 patents. He was awarded an ERC consolidator grant, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Mercator Fellowship of the German Research Foundation, a Spanish Ramon y Cajal grant, as well as nine best paper awards. He is an IEEE Fellow and Distinguished Member of the ACM.