Xiong, JieGanesan, DeepakFeng, Yuda2024-12-192024-12-192024-0910.7275/55247https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/55247Besides the communication function, wireless signals, such as WiFi, Bluetooth and UWB, are recently exploited for sensing purposes. However, designing a wireless sensing system that provides truly pervasive coverage at city or even national scale is still challenging. In this dissertation, we propose to involve the pervasive LTE signals into the ecosystem of wireless sensing, and enable various sensing applications on human, vehicles, and agriculture. In the first part, we exploit the unique advantages of downlink LTE sensing in movement detection across different scales, and resolve the corresponding challenges. We demonstrate the advantages of LTE sensing using two typical applications, finegrained indoor respiration monitoring and large-scale outdoor car speed estimation. The proposed system achieves highly accurate respiration sensing with the common problems, blind spot and orientation-sensitive issues, greatly mitigated. In the second part, we propose to combat inherent limitations of downlink LTE sensing, i.e., the low signal quality due to long propagation and significant variations across different areas. We found the key insight in the unique asymmetric downlink and uplink transmissions. Accordingly, we propose to leverage the complementary features of LTE uplink and downlink signals on signal power, bandwidth and sensing rate. We propose noise-resistant combination algorithms and develop robust LTE sensing, expanding the sensing coverage to more than 4 times and extending to general dynamic movement detection. In the last part, we enable LTE sensing on non-movement physical property detection, soil moisture in agriculture. Soil moisture sensing is a basic function in modern precision irrigation. Multiple wireless soil moisture sensing solutions such as WiFi and RFID have been proposed, which, however, can hardly support large scale deployment in farmfield environments. LTE signal provides a unique opportunity for soil moisture sensing as the ubiquitously deployed base stations. We for the first time propose low-cost and low-power LTE based soil moisture sensing. Our low-cost sensing system ($55) achieves a high accuracy (3.15%) comparable to high-end soil sensors ($850), wide coverage (2.4 km from the base station) and low power consumption (lasting 16 months using batteries).Dissertation (Open Access)https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2004-7191