CIRSense: Rethinking WiFi Sensing with Channel Impulse Response
Ruiqi Kong, He Chen
TL;DR
CIRSense reframes WiFi sensing in the CIR (delay-domain) space, addressing key limitations of CSI-based methods through a fractional-delay–aware motion model and two core mechanisms—Dominant Path Alignment (Domino) for RF distortion compensation and Dynamic Path Alignment (Dylign) for SSNR enhancement. The framework enables accurate respiration monitoring and high-resolution distance estimation on commodity WiFi with a 160 MHz bandwidth, achieving about 0.25 bpm and 0.09 m accuracy, and delivering up to 3x accuracy gains and 4.5x efficiency at challenging ranges. Extensive evaluations across LoS, NLoS, and multi-target scenarios demonstrate CIRSense’s superiority over state-of-the-art CSI baselines, including far-range 20 m sensing where it maintains robust performance. The work highlights the practical viability of CIR-based sensing on mainstream WiFi and points to future improvements in multi-antenna diversity and NLoS localization through enhanced delay-domain processing.
Abstract
WiFi sensing based on channel state information (CSI) collected from commodity WiFi devices has shown great potential across a wide range of applications, including vital sign monitoring and indoor localization. Existing WiFi sensing approaches typically estimate motion information directly from CSI. However, they often overlook the inherent advantages of channel impulse response (CIR), a delay-domain representation that enables more intuitive and principled motion sensing by naturally concentrating motion energy and separating multipath components. Motivated by this, we revisit WiFi sensing and introduce CIRSense, a new framework that enhances the performance and interpretability of WiFi sensing with CIR. CIRSense is built upon a new motion model that characterizes fractional delay effects, a fundamental challenge in CIR-based sensing. This theoretical model underpins technical advances for the three challenges in WiFi sensing: hardware distortion compensation, high-resolution distance estimation, and subcarrier aggregation for extended range sensing. CIRSense, operating with a 160 MHz channel bandwidth, demonstrates versatile sensing capabilities through its dual-mode design, achieving a mean error of approximately 0.25 bpm in respiration monitoring and 0.09 m in distance estimation. Comprehensive evaluations across residential spaces, far-range scenarios, and multi-target settings demonstrate CIRSense's superior performance over state-of-the-art CSI-based baselines. Notably, at a challenging sensing distance of 20 m, CIRSense achieves at least 3x higher average accuracy with more than 4.5x higher computational efficiency.