MIMO RF probe for wide-area indoor human motion monitoring

This paper addresses the problem of RF-based wide-area human motion monitoring in indoor multipath environments. A major challenge for conventional pulse-Doppler radar in multipath scenarios is the difficulty in discriminating direct-path targets from ghost returns due to multipath scattering. In this paper, the ability of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) RF probe to discern both direction-of-departure (DoD) and direction-of-arrival (DoA) via “non-causal” beamforming is exploited for indoor motion monitoring. Preliminary results with real data are presented which demonstrate the sidelobe suppression and multipath mitigation achieved. Also, MIMO processing is analyzed using the bi-directional beampattern and spectrum defined herein.