LTE commsense for object detection in indoor environments

Abstract

In this work, we describe a new method of using long-term evolution (LTE) telecommunication infrastructure to sense environmental changes. We call it LTE communication-based sensing (Com-mSense). It can be used in various environment-sensing tasks, e.g., sea level monitoring, security of large unmanned landscapes, snow avalanche monitoring, and activity detection inside forests. The main concept of this technology is to focus on the known signal embedded in the data frames. It compares the received signal with the expected reference signal to estimate the change in the environment. LTE telecommunication infrastructure is used for this environment-sensing task because of its wide coverage. In addition, LTE uses a two-dimensional (2D) frame structure of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and multiple input and multiple output (MIMO), which may yield better performance compared to previous communication standards. This procedure of extracting channel characteristics using commensal radar principles does not affect the existing telecommunication system, because it is a receive-only system. After the channel characteristics are estimated, they can be used to obtain phenomenological knowledge of the environment using an application-specific instrumentation (ASIN) framework. The capability analysis of this scheme is presented in this article, first in simulation and then using field-collected data captured with the help of a software-defined radio (SDR) platform.