Autonomous Environment Mapping Using Commodity Millimeter-wave Network Device

Abstract

Ambient environment information, including reflectors' location, dimension and reflectivity, is a key input to many millimeter-wave (mmWave) networking and sensing applications. It has found versatile applications in optimizing network coverage and robustness, enhancing mobile link performance, and enabling high-accuracy indoor localization and navigation. Recent approaches of deriving mmWave environment information require heavy infrastructure support or non-trivial human labor, and rely on costly software defined radios, which prevent their usage in practice. In this work, we design and implement mmRanger, a system can automatically sense environment without any infrastructure support. mmRanger equips a pair of low-cost off-the-shelf mmWave radios in a commodity robot, which constantly samples the ambient environment by exchanging a series of mmWave signals while it moves and rotates. mmRanger then re-engineers the time-domain signal series to derive the spatial-domain environment structure, through novel reflection path extraction and reflector mapping algorithms. Our experiments verify that mmRanger can accurately sense a given environment with minimal overhead, and the learned information can bring 1.6× and 2.1× performance gain, in terms of network coverage and mobile link throughput, respectively, over empirical approaches in mmWave networks.