Parasitic Exploitation of Wi-Fi Signals for Indoor Radar Surveillance

In this paper, we examine the potentiality of passive coherent location (PCL) for indoor area monitoring. In particular, we show that Wi-Fi transmissions can be successfully exploited as waveforms of opportunity to perform moving target detection and localization based on the passive radar principle. Moreover, we investigate the advanced capability to obtain high-resolution cross-range profiles of the observed targets via inverse-synthetic-aperture-radar (ISAR) techniques. To these purposes, appropriate processing techniques are introduced to cope with the limitations resulting from the indoor applications such as the strong returns from the stationary scene and the high density of potential targets. The proposed system concept has been tested against both simulated and real data sets. The reported results clearly show that using few receiving channels connected to properly dislocated antennas allows an accurate target localization and tracking. In addition, reliable and stable profiles are obtained for the targets moving in the surveyed scene, which might fruitfully feed a classification stage. This contributes to the demonstration of the effective applicability of the passive radar concept for improving internal and external security of private/public premises.