DoDTrack: Indoor Mobile Devices Tracking via Difference-of-Doppler

In this paper, the Doppler frequency shift (DFS) is exploited as the only sensing parameter for low-cost indoor mobile device tracking. The existing trajectory tracking methods via DFS of Wi-Fi systems often require the knowledge of the starting position or additional information, like angle-of-arrival (AoA) and time-of-flight (ToF), to recover the trajectory of a moving target. This paper proposes the DoDTrack, a novel Difference-of-Doppler (DoD)-based tracking system, to track an active mobile device using a single receiver with distributed antennas. By comparing the signals received at the distributed receive antennas, which share the oscillator, the DoDs among the antennas can be detected robustly. Then, the reconstruction of the trajectory without prior knowledge of the trajectory starting position can be formulated as a minimum mean square error (MMSE) problem, which can be solved via alternating optimization. Particularly, the starting position and the trajectory shape are updated alternately in the proposed algorithm. In performance validation, we implemented the proposed DoDTrack design on a USRP-X310 platform, and assessed its estimation accuracy with various trajectory shapes in an indoor environment. Experimental results demonstrate that DoDTrack achieves a median tracking error of 0.34 m within a 6 m $\times$ 6 m sensing area, offering a high-precision and low-cost solution for active device tracking.