Description
mmWave radar refers to FMCW or pulsed radar sensors operating in the 24, 60, 77, or 79 GHz bands. They serve as the comparison baseline to Wi-Fi CSI in indoor sensing literature: range resolution is intrinsically better (centimetres vs metres for CSI) thanks to gigahertz of bandwidth, but they are dedicated hardware (not infrastructure-piggybacked) so cost / deployment friction is much higher. Texas Instruments IWR1443 / IWR6843 and Infineon BGT60TR13C are the two reference platforms most cited papers use. For the thesis they appear as the "ground-truth radar" against which CSI accuracy is benchmarked, and as motivation for sticking with commodity Wi-Fi (deployment cost).
Specs / capabilities
- 24 / 60 / 77 / 79 GHz bands
- Up to 4 GHz of FMCW chirp bandwidth → cm-scale range resolution
- Built-in MIMO antenna arrays (typically 3 Tx × 4 Rx) for AoA estimation
- Range, velocity, angle (3D point cloud) per frame
- Detection range 1-10 m (TI IWR family); up to 100 m for automotive
Tooling
- TI mmWave SDK: https://www.ti.com/tool/MMWAVE-SDK
- mmWave Studio (Windows GUI for raw ADC capture)
- Open-source:
OpenRadar,pymmw,radar-tinyml - Vayyar Walabot for prototyping
Used by (papers)
- mmWave + CSI fusion papers
- mmWave-only baselines for indoor activity / vital-sign / gesture recognition