D-Watch: Embracing “Bad” Multipaths for Device-Free Localization With COTS RFID Devices

Device-free localization, which does not require any device attached to the target, is playing a critical role in many applications, such as intrusion detection, elderly monitoring and so on. This paper introduces D-Watch, a device-free system built on the top of low cost commodity-off-the-shelf RFID hardware. Unlike previous works which consider multipaths detrimental, D-Watch leverages the “bad” multipaths to provide a decimeter-level localization accuracy without offline training. D-Watch harnesses the angle-of-arrival information from the RFID tags' backscatter signals. The key intuition is that whenever a target blocks a signal's propagation path, the signal power experiences a drop which can be accurately detected by the proposed novel P-MUSIC algorithm. The proposed wireless phase calibration scheme does not interrupt the ongoing data communication and thus reduces the deployment burden. We implement and evaluate D-Watch with extensive experiments in three different environments. D-Watch achieves a median accuracy of 16.5 cm for library, 25.5 cm for laboratory, and 31.2 cm for hall environment, outperforming the state-of-the-art systems. In a table area of 2 $\text{m}\times 2$ m, D-Watch can track a user's fist at a median accuracy of 5.8 cm. D-Watch is also capable of localizing multiple targets which is well known to be challenging in passive localization.