SenCom: Integrated Sensing and Communication with Practical WiFi

Abstract

Given the fact that WiFi-based sensing can be realized by reusing WiFi communication facilities and communication frequency bands, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is considered a crucial development direction for future WiFi standards, such as IEEE 802.11bf. Traditional WiFi sensing systems extract channel state information (CSI) from customized WiFi packets to quantify the characteristics of the sensing target. This poses challenges for existing WiFi systems originally designed for communication purposes, as it requires high-quality and sufficient CSI measurements. In this paper, we propose SenCom, which extracts CSI from general WiFi packets. SenCom enables CSI calibration across different WiFi communication modes and provides unified CSI measurements for upper-layer sensing applications. We also devise a fitting-resampling scheme to derive evenly sampled CSI with consistent dimensionality, and an incentive strategy to ensure sufficient CSI measurements over time. We build a prototype of SenCom and perform extensive experiments with 15 participants. The results show that SenCom is competent for a variety of sensing tasks, while incurring little compromise to the WiFi communication performance.