Intruder detection and tracking using UWB technology

UWB communication is essentially the transmission and receiving of ultra short electromagnetic energy pulses. Short pulses mean wide bandwidths, often greatly exceeding 25% of the nominal center frequency. Modern UWB radio is characterized by very low power transmission (in the range of tens of microwatts) and wide bandwidths (greater than a gigahertz). One of the major applications of Ultra-wide band technology has been for detection and tracking of intruders in different environments. Based on some of our previous work [1,2] we developed a hybrid Ray-tracing/FDTD technique to study the indoor and outdoor propagation of UWB signals. The basic goal of this paper is to describe the experimental and simulation studies that were conducted to locate and track an intruder inside a UWB sensor web system. The sensor was developed using the Time Domain P-200 device and the software was developed using MATLAB. Return scans from UWB devices are analyzed to determine the noise floor and the signal strength. Using the noise floor level a threshold level is set above which the alarm will be triggered to determine the presence of an intruder. The probability of false alarm (PFA) is also determined using the Signal-to-Noise ratio and the threshold. We vary the PFA to lower the false alarm to a minimum level. We also determine the noise statistics of the system using Non-parametric Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test. Using this basic UWB sensor web system we will try to determine the physical dimensions of the intruder and also track multiple intruders on the system.