Kiran Raj Joshi

SpotFi: Decimeter Level Localization Using WiFi

This paper presents the design and implementation of SpotFi, an accurate indoor localization system that can be deployed on commodity WiFi infrastructure. SpotFi only uses information that is already exposed by WiFi chips and does not require any hardware or firmware changes, yet achieves the same accuracy as state-of-the-art localization systems. SpotFi makes two key technical contributions. First, SpotFi incorporates super-resolution algorithms that can accurately compute the angle of arrival (AoA) of multipath components even when the access point (AP) has only three antennas. Second, it incorporates novel filtering and estimation techniques to identify AoA of direct path between the localization target and AP by assigning values for each path depending on how likely the particular path is the direct path. Our experiments in a multipath rich indoor environment show that SpotFi achieves a median accuracy of 40 cm and is robust to indoor hindrances such as obstacles and multipath.

BackFi: High Throughput WiFi Backscatter

We present BackFi, a novel communication system that enables high throughput, long range communication between very low power backscatter devices and WiFi APs using ambient WiFi transmissions as the excitation signal. Specifically, we show that it is possible to design devices and WiFi APs such that the WiFi AP in the process of transmitting data to normal WiFi clients can decode backscatter signals which the devices generate by modulating information on to the ambient WiFi transmission. We show via prototypes and experiments that it is possible to achieve communication rates of up to 5 Mbps at a range of 1 m and 1 Mbps at a range of 5 meters. Such performance is an order to three orders of magnitude better than the best known prior WiFi backscatter system [27,25]. BackFi design is energy efficient, as it relies on backscattering alone and needs insignificant power, hence the energy consumed per bit is small.

HitchHike: Practical Backscatter Using Commodity WiFi

We present HitchHike, a low power backscatter system that can be deployed entirely using commodity WiFi infrastructure. With HitchHike, a low power tag reflects existing 802.11b transmissions from a commodity WiFi transmitter, and the backscattered signals can then be decoded as a standard WiFi packet by a commodity 802.11b receiver. Hitch-Hikes key invention is a novel technique called codeword translation, which allows a backscatter tag to embed its information on standard 802.11b packets by just translating the original transmitted 802.11b codeword to another valid 802.11b codeword. This allows any 802.11b receiver to decode the backscattered packet, thus opening the doors for widespread deployment of low-power backscatter communication using widely available WiFi infrastructure. We show experimentally that HitchHike can achieve an uplink throughput of up to 300Kbps at ranges of up to 34m and ranges of up to 54m where it achieves a throughput of around 200Kbps.

Robust full duplex radio link

This paper presents demonstration of a real-time full duplex point-to-point link, where transmission and reception occurs in the same spectrum band simultaneously between a pair of full-duplex radios. This demo first builds a full duplex radio by implementing self-interference cancellation technique on top of a traditional half duplex radio architecture. We then establish a point-to-point link using a pair of these radios that can transmit and receive OFDM packets. By changing the environmental conditions around the full-duplex radios we then demonstrate the robustness of the self-interference cancellation to adapt to the changing environment.

Enabling Backscatter Communication among Commodity WiFi Radios

We present the first low power backscatter system that can be deployed completely using commodity WiFi infrastructure. With this system, a low power tag reflects existing 802.11b transmissions from a commodity WiFi transmitter, and the backscattered signals can be decoded as a standard WiFi packet by a commodity 802.11b receiver. The key invention is a novel technique called \textbf{codeword translation}, which allows a backscatter tag to embed its information on standard 802.11b packets by just translating the original transmitted 802.11b codeword to another valid 802.11b codeword. This allows any 802.11b receiver to decode the backscattered packet, thus opening the doors for widespread deployment of low-power backscatter communication using widely available WiFi infrastructure. We show experimentally that we can achieve an uplink throughput of up to 1Mbps at ranges of up to 8m and ranges of up to 50m where it achieves a throughput of around 100Kbps, which is twice as better than the recently published passive WiFi system.