May 19, 2022

Is Sensing the Next Killer App for Wi-Fi?

Wi-Fi Sensing technology can sense the disruption of the signal and use the information to determine the size, speed, and location of the disruption.

When a boat moves through the water, it creates waves, which, if analyzed, can provide an indication of its size, speed, and direction. A new Wi-Fi technology seeks to do something similar. Wi-Fi Sensing leverages existing Wi-Fi signals to sense motion, which can then be used to enable many new applications.

Additionally, sensing enables Wi-Fi networks to become more interactive. Envisioned applications include motion detection, gesture recognition, security, smart homes, and more.

How Wi-Fi Sensing works

Wi-Fi Sensing technology uses Wi-Fi signals to sense activities and interpret movement. How? The Wi-Fi standard provides a set of back-and-forth signaling protocols to set up Wi-Fi stations. The technology applies artificial intelligence to make sense of Wi-Fi signals. Specifically, AI is applied to channel state information (CSI), which has information about the communication link. That information describes how a signal propagates from the transmitter to the receiver and incorporates the effect of scattering, fading, and power decay over distance.

While the CSI was designed primarily for data communication, it captures a lot of information about the operating environment. Every time a data packet is sent over the air via Wi-Fi, the Wi-Fi devices compute the CSI of the wireless channel to overcome interference from the environment to decode the data packet properly. In recent years this information has been used to overcome the interference due to the movement of objects.

Wi-Fi Sensing technology can sense the disruption of the signal and use the information to determine the size, speed, and location of the disruption. Some sensing capabilities include basic motion detection, motion localization, presence detection, speed/velocity measurement, breathing detection, sleep monitoring, and daily activity monitoring.

To read the full article from Network Computing, click here.