Wireless backscatter and imaging

The deployment of large-scale mm-wave technology in 5G wireless networks poses another intriguing possibility. Can we re-purpose such communication networks to enable additional functionality such as imaging? There have been demonstrations of wireless imaging in controlled lab experiments, but there has not been much progress of wireless imaging in the wild, especially using a distributed network of nodes. In NSF project OneDegree: Foundations and Methods for Imaging in mmWave Wireless Networks, along with collaborators from Rice, we are starting to investigate these ideas, using tools from machine learning and information theory. In preliminary work, we showed that one can connect to ideas from error-correcting codes to assist the imaging problem using backscattering tags. We are working on developing theory, algorithms, and testbed implementations of such ideas in this project.