Modeling received signal strength and multipath propagation effects of moving persons

Device-free localization (DFL) systems detect and track persons without devices that participate in the localization process. A person moving within a target area affects the electromagnetic field that is measured by received signal strength (RSS) values. Consequently for DFL systems modeling of RSS is important and still an open issue. In this paper, we develop a simple model for prediction of RSS values in a setup with transmitter and receiver devices, a person and multipath propagation. We design and implement the model as a superposition of both, knife-edge diffraction to account for the change made by the person, and, propagation effects such as multipath propagation that result in reflection and path loss including the antenna characteristics. We evaluate our model in comparison with real measurements in various setups with and without multipath propagation. We achieve an accuracy that is close to our hardware limitations, which is the resolution of the measured RSS values of the receiver.