This paper presents WiSee, a novel gesture recognition system that leverages wireless signals (e.g., Wi-Fi) to enable whole-home sensing and recognition of human gestures. Since wireless signals do not require line-of-sight and can traverse through walls, WiSee can enable wholehome gesture recognition using few wireless sources. Further, it achieves this goal without requiring instrumentation of the human body with sensing devices. We implement a proof-ofconcept prototype of WiSee using USRP-N210s and evaluate it in both an office environment and a two-bedroom apartment. Our results show that WiSee can identify and classify a set of nine gestures with an average accuracy of 94%.

Communication primitives such as coding and multiple antenna processing have provided significant benefits for traditional wireless systems. Existing designs, however, consume significant power and computational resources, and hence cannot be run on low complexity, power constrained backscatter devices. This paper makes two main contributions: (1) we introduce the first multi-antenna cancellation design that operates on backscatter devices while retaining a small form factor and power footprint, (2) we introduce a novel coding mechanism that enables long range communication as well as concurrent transmissions and can be decoded on backscatter devices. We build hardware prototypes of the above designs that can be powered solely using harvested energy from TV and solar sources. The results show that our designs provide benefits for both RFID and ambient backscatter systems: they enable RFID tags to communicate directly with each other at distances of tens of meters and through multiple walls. They also increase the communication rate and range achieved by ambient backscatter systems by 100X and 40X respectively. We believe that this paper represents a substantial leap in the capabilities of backscatter communication.

The throughput of existing MIMO LANs is limited by the number of antennas on the AP. This paper shows how to overcome this limitation. It presents interference alignment and cancellation (IAC), a new approach for decoding concurrent sender-receiver pairs in MIMO networks. IAC synthesizes two signal processing techniques, interference alignment and interference cancellation, showing that the combination applies to scenarios where neither interference alignment nor cancellation applies alone. We show analytically that IAC almost doubles the throughput of MIMO LANs. We also implement IAC in GNU-Radio, and experimentally demonstrate that for 2x2 MIMO LANs, IAC increases the average throughput by 1.5x on the downlink and 2x on the uplink.

Traditionally, interference is considered harmful. Wireless networks strive to avoid scheduling multiple transmissions at the same time in order to prevent interference. This paper adopts the opposite approach; it encourages strategically picked senders to interfere. Instead of forwarding packets, routers forward the interfering signals. The destination leverages network-level information to cancel the interference and recover the signal destined to it. The result is analog network coding because it mixes signals not bits.So, what if wireless routers forward signals instead of packets? Theoretically, such an approach doubles the capacity of the canonical 2-way relay network. Surprisingly, it is also practical. We implement our design using software radios and show that it achieves significantly higher throughput than both traditional wireless routing and prior work on wireless network coding. Alice Bob Router(a) Alice-Bob topology. Dotted lines show the radio range.

The throughput of existing MIMO LANs is limited by the number of antennas on the AP. This paper shows how to overcome this limitation. It presents interference alignment and cancellation (IAC), a new approach for decoding concurrent sender-receiver pairs in MIMO networks. IAC synthesizes two signal processing techniques, interference alignment and interference cancellation, showing that the combination applies to scenarios where neither interference alignment nor cancellation applies alone. We show analytically that IAC almost doubles the throughput of MIMO LANs. We also implement IAC in GNU-Radio, and experimentally demonstrate that for 2x2 MIMO LANs, IAC increases the average throughput by 1.5x on the downlink and 2x on the uplink.

-There is a growing interest in physical layer security. Recent work has demonstrated that wireless devices can generate a shared secret key by exploiting variations in their channel. The rate at which the secret bits are generated, however, depends heavily on how fast the channel changes. As a result, existing schemes have a low secrecy rate and are mainly applicable to mobile environments. In contrast, this paper presents a new physical-layer approach to secret key generation that is both fast and independent of channel variations. Our approach makes a receiver jam the signal in a manner that still allows it to decode the data, yet prevents other nodes from decoding. Results from a testbed implementation show that our method is significantly faster and more accurate than state of the art physical-layer secret key generation protocols. Specifically, while past work generates up to 44 secret bits/s with a 4% bit disagreement between the two devices, our design has a secrecy rate of 3-18 Kb/s with 0% bit disagreement. 1I NTRODUCTIONPhysical layer security enables two wireless nodes to exchange secret data in the presence of an eavesdropper, without encryption [24]. It is an information-theoretic construct that exploits randomness at the wireless physical layer and does not require computational hardness [12]. It may be used to replace encryption when the communicating devices lack the computational resources for prime number generation (e.g., sensors [21,23]), or to generate a continuous stream of fresh secret keys that strengthen existing cryptographic protocols [28,12]. Physical layer security is rooted in Shannon's work on perfect secrecy [24]. It has experienced a renaissance in recent years with a plethora of new theoretical results that characterize secrecy capacity [5,9,30], develop codes for secure communications [18,26], and exploit channel variations across time, space, and users for higher information rates. These theoretical advances have culminated with the emergence of practical systems, where wireless devices have been empirically shown to use the characteristics of their wireless channel to generate a secret key in the presence of an eavesdropper [21,17,6].Existing practical systems however are highly limited in the rate at which they generate secret bits. Today, the highest empirically achieved secrecy rate is only 44 bits/s [6]. Further, achieving this rate requires mobility and incurs 4% average bit disagreement between communicating nodes. The low secrecy rate is because existing schemes extract secret bits from the channel variations, and hence cannot generate new secret bits unless the channel changes. In fact, experimental results show that in static scenarios, the extracted bits have very low entropy making them less suitable for a secret key [17]. In this paper, we investigate a new approach to physical layer security that is independent of channel variations, and thus works even when the channel is static. We introduce iJam, a channel-independent PHY technique that ensures that ...

We present a contactless solution for detecting sleep apnea events on smartphones. To achieve this, we introduce a novel system that monitors the minute chest and abdomen movements caused by breathing on smartphones. Our system works with the phone away from the subject and can simultaneously identify and track the fine-grained breathing movements from multiple subjects. We do this by transforming the phone into an active sonar system that emits frequency-modulated sound signals and listens to their reflections; our design monitors the minute changes to these reflections to extract the chest movements. Results from a home bedroom environment shows that our design operates efficiently at distances of up to a meter and works even with the subject under a blanket.Building on the above system, we develop algorithms that identify various sleep apnea events including obstructive apnea, central apnea, and hypopnea from the sonar reflections. We deploy our system at the UW Medicine Sleep Center at Harborview and perform a clinical study with 37 patients for a total of 296 hours. Our study demonstrates that the number of respiratory events identified by our system is highly correlated with the ground truth and has a correlation coefficient of 0.9957, 0.9860, and 0.9533 for central apnea, obstructive apnea and hypopnea respectively. Furthermore, the average error in computing of rate of apnea and hypopnea events is as low as 1.9 events/hr.

This paper presents the design and implementation of 802.11n+ , a fully distributed random access protocol for MIMO networks. 802.11n+ allows nodes that differ in the number of antennas to contend not just for time, but also for the degrees of freedom provided by multiple antennas. We show that even when the medium is already occupied by some nodes, nodes with more antennas can transmit concurrently without harming the ongoing transmissions. Furthermore, such nodes can contend for the medium in a fully distributed way. Our testbed evaluation shows that even for a small network with three competing node pairs, the resulting system about doubles the average network throughput. It also maintains the random access nature of today's 802.11n networks.