Demonstrating Device-free Localization based on Radio Tomographic Imaging

Radio tomographic imaging (RTI) is a localization technique that can estimate the position of an object on the basis of the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) acquired by WiFi or other wireless networks. In this paper, we demonstrate the RTI approach by utilizing full electromagnetic simulations of an indoor environment. In particular, we consider dielectric cylinders with varying permittivities but fixed radius in which 20 WiFi nodes are deployed on the perimeter (6 m by 3 m) of a room to perform RTI. RTI based on the line-of-sight (LOS) weighting model with total variation based regularization was then used to demonstrate device-free localization. The results indicate that device-free location is possible, even for very high permittivities of greater than 30, motivating further future investigations.