Leveraging Millimiter Wave Communications for Effective Remote Sensing

Millimeter wave (mmWave) is a promising technique in the 5th generation of cellular communications due to its large bandwidth and thus unprecedentedly high data transmission rate. To study the characteristics of mmWave and evaluate various algorithms, we build a high directional mmWave communication testbed.

The first topic of this thesis consists of two parts. The first one seeks to track a single object by using blockage phenomenon. Algorithms to capture the moving object are proposed. Detailed experiments and numerical simulations are compared with actual GPS trajectory to demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed solutions. In the second part, we formulate the multiple moving objects problem and then convert it to an intuitive geometric problem. Numerical results have shown that the proposed algorithms are promising and may find potential applications in practice.

The second topic in this thesis leverages the mmWave communications in the outdoor environment to estimate wind velocity. A force and motion model is proposed and the Doppler effect is considered to prove the causation between wind velocity and frequency difference. Then we propose a mathematical model and algorithms to estimate wind velocity in one receiver with multiple beams in different directions. We carry out experiments in the 60GHz band to demonstrate the theoretical prediction, with the outcome matching the theoretical model. Numerical simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of wind velocity estimation.

The third topic studies optical-like characteristics of mmWave. The mechanism of oscillation is exhaustively illustrated. We propose an algorithm using its periodic trends and a simulation with real measurements testifies its accuracy in short distance. We carry out experiments in our testbed to verify the phenomenons of reflection and diffraction. Then we propose a tracking algorithm based on the Kalman Filter.