Binbin Xie: “Long-Range Wide-Area Wireless Sensing”

My research explores the exciting potential of employing LoRa—the emerging low-power wide-area network technology designed for IoT device connectivity, to enable long-range wide-area wireless sensing and address fundamental challenges, moving wireless sensing closer to real-life adoption. First, we fully leverage the unique properties of chirp signals to extend the sensing range.2 The basic idea is to concentrate the power of chirp signals in the time domain, enabling significantly longer sensing distances. To mitigate interference, we propose a controllable “virtual fence” that confines sensing to a specific area of interest.3 This ensures that movements outside the virtual fence have little impact on sensing within it. Further, we address the challenge of sensing with device mobility by modeling the effects of device motion on human sensing. We design a leader–follower scheme with two antennas following the same trajectory to eliminate signal variations induced by device motion.4