SPARCS: A Sparse Recovery Approach for Integrated Communication and Human Sensing in mmWave Systems

A well established method to detect and classify human movements using Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) devices is the time-frequency analysis of the small-scale Doppler effect (termed micro-Doppler) of the different body parts, which requires a regularly spaced and dense sampling of the Channel Impulse Response (CIR). This is currently done in the literature either using special-purpose radar sen-sors, or interrupting communications to transmit dedicated sensing waveforms, entailing high overhead and channel utilization. In this work we present SPARCS, an integrated human sensing and commu-nication solution for mmWave systems. SPARCS is the first method that reconstructs high quality signatures of human movement from irregular and sparse CIR samples, such as the ones obtained during communication traffic patterns. To accomplish this, we formulate the micro-Doppler extraction as a sparse recovery problem, which is critical to enable a smooth integration between communication and sensing. Moreo...