HyperTracking: Exploring the Hyperbolic Model for Non-line-of-sight Device-free Wi-Fi Tracking

Wireless sensing technology allows for non-intrusive sensing without the need for physical sensors worn by the target, enabling a wide range of applications, such as indoor tracking, and activity identification. To theoretically reveal the fundamental principles of wireless sensing, the Fresnel zone model has been introduced in the field of Wi-Fi sensing. While the Fresnel zone model is effective in explaining the sensing mechanism in line-of-sight (LoS) scenarios, achieving accurate sensing in non-line-of-sight (NLoS) situations continues to pose a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel theoretical model called the Hyperbolic zone to reveal the fundamental sensing mechanism in NLoS scenarios. The main principle is to eliminate the complex NLoS path shared among different transmitter-receiver pairs, which allows us to obtain a series of simple "virtual" reflection paths among receivers. Since these "virtual" reflection paths satisfy the properties of the hyperbola, we propose the hyperbolic tracking model. Based on the proposed model, we implement the HyperTracking system using commercial Wi-Fi devices. The experimental results show that the proposed hyperbolic model is suitable for accurate tracking in both LoS and NLoS scenarios. We can reduce 0.36 m tracking error in contrast to the Fresnel zone model in NLoS scenarios. When we utilize the proposed hyperbolic model to train a typical LSTM neural network, we are able to further reduce the tracking error by 0.13 m and save the execution time by 281% with the same data. As a whole, our method can reduce the tracking error by 54% in NLoS scenarios compared with the Fresnel zone model.