Enabling Ubiquitous Wi-Fi Sensing with Beamforming Reports

Chenhao Wu, Xuan Huang, Jun Huang, Guoliang Xing*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary WorksRGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)peer-review

23 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Wi-Fi sensing systems leverage wireless signals from widely deployed Wi-Fi devices to realize sensing for a broad range of applications. However, current Wi-Fi sensing systems heavily rely on the channel state information (CSI) to learn the signal propagation characteristics, while the availability of CSI is highly dependent on specific Wi-Fi chipsets. Through a city-scale measurement, we discover that the availability of CSI is extremely limited in operational Wi-Fi devices. In this work, we propose a new wireless sensing system called BeamSense that exploits the compressed beamforming reports (CBR). Due to the extensive support of transmit beamforming in operational Wi-Fi devices, CBR is commonly accessible and hence enables a ubiquitous sensing capability. BeamSense adopts a novel multi-path estimation algorithm that can efficiently and accurately map bidirectional CBR to a multi-path channel based on intrinsic fingerprints. We implement BeamSense on several prevalent models of Wi-Fi devices and evaluated its performance with microbenchmarks and three representative Wi-Fi sensing applications. The results show that BeamSense is capable of enabling existing CSI-based sensing algorithms to work with CBR with high sensing accuracy and improved generalizability. © 2023 ACM.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSIGCOMM '23: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference
Place of PublicationNew York, NY
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages20-32
ISBN (Print)979-8-4007-0236-5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event37th ACM SIGCOMM (ACM SIGCOMM 2023) - Columbia University, New York City, United States
Duration: 10 Sept 202314 Sept 2023
https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2023/

Publication series

NameSIGCOMM - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference

Conference

Conference37th ACM SIGCOMM (ACM SIGCOMM 2023)
Abbreviated titleSIGCOMM 2023
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew York City
Period10/09/2314/09/23
Internet address

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