Forward-Compatible Integrated Sensing and Communication for WiFi

Given the fact that WiFi-based sensing can be realized through the reuse of WiFi communication facilities and frequency bands, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) emerges as a pivotal direction for future WiFi standards, such as IEEE 802.11bf. Traditional WiFi sensing systems extract channel state information (CSI) from exclusive WiFi packets to quantify the characteristics of the sensing target. This poses challenges for existing WiFi systems originally designed for communication purposes, as it demands high-quality and sufficient CSI measurements. In this paper, we propose SenCom as a step towards forward-compatible ISAC solution. SenCom extracts CSI from general WiFi packets, enabling CSI calibration across different WiFi communication modes and delivering quality CSI measurements for upper-layer sensing applications. A fitting-resampling scheme and an incentive strategy are also developed. The former one is to obtain evenly sampled CSI with consistent dimensionality and the latter one is to guarantee sufficient CSI measurements over time. We build a prototype of SenCom and conduct extensive experiments involving 15 participants. The results show that SenCom’s competence for a variety of sensing tasks while making minimal compromises to WiFi communication performance.