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Vrishab’s Status Report for 02/27/2021

Determining Constraints:

This week, I focused on pinning down some of the specifications for our beamformer design. I began by working with Enock and Txanton to identify a specific use case for our project, and we settled on detecting hidden devices within a standard room.  From this use case, we derived several constraints specific to our operational context: the size of a “typical” room was sourced from a report by NIST (see slides for reference); and the typical device size which we aim to detect was sourced from statista (reference in slides).

Establishing Main Lobe Width:

With these constraints fixed, I performed some simple calculations involving the minimum separation between devices within the space of our average room from which the main lobe width of our beamformer was ascertained. The main lobe width can be thought of as how much of our device’s field of view can be seen clearly at one time; the narrower the main lobe width, the smaller the portion of room we can see at once (meaning we have to look at more spots within the room), but the more accurate our results will be — a tradeoff between processing time and accuracy.

Progress Since Last Week:

I have addressed many of the uncertainties in our beamformer design since last week, largely due to the guidance of this paper, https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/439/3/3180/1113793, which details the implementation of a beamformer architecture that we will follow closely. These specifications have addressed the points that we outlined in last week’s progress report.

Plans for Next Week:

Per our proposed schedule (see slides), this next week will involve the critical first steps in two of our project divisions: antenna design and signal processing pipeline implementation. On the antenna design side, we hope to finalize the configuration of our antenna array, as well as pin down the type and brand of antenna that we will use.  On the signal processing pipeline side, we will finalize our beamformer algorithm which we are in the final stages of adapting from the aforementioned paper.

 

 

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Team Status Report for 02/20/2021

This week, we worked on identifying the critical components — hardware, software, and theoretical — that we will need in order to move forward with our project. We also discussed the architecture that we will use for beamforming wifi signals, such as the hardware components and their connection to and sampling of the array sensor elements.

The greatest risk that we face going forward are a lack of compatibility between our sensors that the signals we hope to capture. Wifi signals are transmitted at a relatively high frequency, so we need hardware that can sample it at the nyquist rate; this is not feasible using some boards, so we need to be careful which ones we choose. We mitigating this risk by thoroughly researching our hardware before we finalize anything.

We have only started design of our architecture this week, as per our schedule, so there have been no significant architectural changes since last week; our particular project demands some quite specific hardware, and so we are taking our time in planning out our system. Once we have our hardware, the design of our system will adhere closely to existing beamforming architectures, since any deviation from those will greatly complicate the underlying theoretical calculations and will more than likely yield sub-optimal results.

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Vrishab’s Status Report for 02/20/2021

This week I worked on structuring our signal processing pipeline that we will use for beamforming. In particular, I read through several papers on how to beamform wifi signals, as well as implementation details regarding the spacing of array elements. I also met with Dr. Richard Stern to discuss implementation and architectures of beamformers in the domain of audio processing.

Our progress is on schedule in terms of the beamformer design. Within the next week, I hope to have finalized a beamforming algorithm we will use in our design. I also hope to have identified the critical components that we will need (antennas, A/D converters, clocks, etc.) for our beamformer.