This document summarises the results of several research campaigns over the past seven years. The main connecting theme is the physical layer of widely deployed sensors in Pervasive Computing domains. In particular, we have focused on the RF-channel or on ambient audio. The initial problem from which we started this work was that of distributed adaptive transmit beamforming. We have been looking for a simple method to align the phases of jointly transmitting nodes (e.g. sensor or IoT nodes). The algorithmic solution to this problem was to implement a distributed random optimisation method on the participating nodes in which the transmitters and the receiver follow an iterative question-and-answer scheme. We have been able to derive sharp asymptotic bounds on the expected optimisation time of an evolutionary random optimiser and presented an asymptotically optimal approach. One thing that we have learned from the work on these physical layer algorithms was that the signals we work on are fragile and perceptive to physical environmental changes. These could be obstacles such as furniture, opened or closed windows or doors as well as movement of individuals. This observation motivated us to view the wireless interface as a sensor for environmental changes in Pervasive Computing environments. Another use of physical layer RF-signals is for security applications. We are currently working to further push these mentioned directions and novel fields of physical prototyping. In particular, the calculation of mathematical operations on the wireless channel at the time of transmission appears to contain good potential for gains in efficiency for communication and computation in Pervasive Computing domains.
@cite_148: Recognition of everyday physical activities is difficult due to the challenges of building informative, yet unobtrusive sensors. The most widely deployed and used mobile computing device today is the mobile phone, which presents an obvious candidate for recognizing activities. This paper explores how coarse-grained GSM data from mobile phones can be used to recognize high-level properties of user mobility, and daily step count. We demonstrate that even without knowledge of observed cell tower locations, we can recognize mobility modes that are useful for several application domains. Our mobility detection system was evaluated with GSM traces from the everyday lives of three data collectors over a period of one month, yielding an overall average accuracy of 85 , and a daily step count number that reasonably approximates the numbers determined by several commercial pedometers.
Sohn et. al describe a system that extracts seven features from GSM signal strength measurements to distinguish six velocity levels with an accuracy of @math @cite_148 . The features mainly build on distinct measures of variation in signal strength and the frequency of cell-tower changes in the active set.