A Multi-Static Radar Network with Ultra-Wideband Radio-Equipped Devices

A growing number of devices, from car key fobs to mobile phones to WiFi-routers, are equipped with ultra-wideband radios. In the network formed by these devices, communicating modules often estimate the channel impulse response to employ a matched filter to decode transmitted data or to accurately time stamp incoming messages when estimating the time-of-flight for localization. This paper investigates how such measurements of the channel impulse response can be utilized to augment existing ultra-wideband communication and localization networks to a multi-static radar network. The approach is experimentally evaluated using off-the-shelf hardware and simple, distributed filtering, and shows that a tag-free human walking in the space equipped with ultra-wideband modules can be tracked in real time. This opens the door for various location-based smart home applications, ranging from smart audio and light systems to elderly monitoring and security systems.