Pushing the Limits of Long Range Wireless Sensing with LoRa

Abstract

Wireless sensing is an exciting new research area which enables a large variety of applications ranging from coarse-grained daily activity recognition to fine-grained vital sign monitoring. While promising in many aspects, one critical issue is the limited sensing range because weak reflection signals are used for sensing. Recently, LoRa signals are exploited for wireless sensing, moving a big step towards long-range sensing. Although promising, there is still a huge room for improvement. In this work, we qualitatively characterize the relationship between target movements and target-induced signal variations, and propose signal processing methods to enlarge the induced signal variation to achieve a longer sensing range. Experiment results show that the proposed system (1) pushes the contact-free sensing range of human walking from the state-of-the-art 50 m to 120 m; (2) achieves a sensing range of 75 m for fine-grained respiration sensing; and (3) demonstrates human respiration sensing even through seven concrete walls.