Zheng Yang - Smart Wireless Sensing: From IoT to AIoT

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Perception of human beings has evolved from natural biosensor to powerful sensors and sensor networks. In sensor networks, trillions of devices are interconnected and sense a broad spectrum of contexts for human beings, laying the foundation of Internet of Things (IoT). Though promising, sensor technologies face several limitations pertaining to deployment cost and usability. First, large-scale deployment is costly. Second, the operation and maintenance of massive sensors are cumbersome. Third, the equipped sensors are intrusive to the targets. All these limitations render the sensor technologies undesirable for practical use. Consequently, the pursuit of convenience in human perception necessitates a wireless, sensorless, and contactless sensing paradigm.

The past decades have witnessed rapid development in wireless sensing technologies. Wireless sensing is featured by sensing with imperceptible wireless signals (such as acoustic, light, and radio frequency signals) that are originally designed for data transmission or illumination. During propagation, wireless signals often undergo various physical phenomena including projection, reflection, refraction, and scattering, all of which modulate the wireless signals in different manners. By analyzing the signal measurements on the receiver side, channel characteristics can be obtained to convey the sensing results. Nowadays, many efforts have been devoted to exploiting the ambient Wi-Fi, RFID, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and television signals for smart wireless sensing, relieving the need for dedicated sensors. If enabled, the human perception paradigm will be reformed, and new possibilities will be fostered, promising the next breakthrough for Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT).

In this monograph, we aim to provide a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of wireless sensing technologies. Specifically, with a particular focus on Wi-Fi-based sensing for human behavior understanding, this monograph follows a top-down approach to introduce three prominent topics including human detection, localization, and activity recognition. For each topic, it presents the latest advances in smart wireless sensing through extensive reviewing of state-of-the-art researches. This monograph differs from existing literature in the following aspects. On the one hand, we elaborate from the perspectives of both non-specialists and specialists, who will benefit from the basic principles and the in-depth discussions, respectively, in this monograph. On the other hand, after almost 10 years of research experience in wireless sensing, the authors track the cutting-edge progress and present the solutions to the three most prominent problems that exist in this field. We hope this monograph can motivate the development of this research area and contribute to the interdisciplinary research areas as well.