SANSee: A Physical-Layer Semantic-Aware Networking Framework for Distributed Wireless Sensing

Contactless device-free wireless sensing has recently attracted significant interest due to its potential to support a wide range of immersive human-machine interactive applications using ubiquitously available radio frequency (RF) signals. Traditional approaches focus on developing a single global model based on a combined dataset collected from different locations. However, wireless signals are known to be location and environment specific. Thus, a global model results in inconsistent and unreliable sensing results. It is also unrealistic to construct individual models for all the possible locations and environmental scenarios. Motivated by the observation that signals recorded at different locations are closely related to a set of physical-layer semantic features, in this paper we propose SANSee, a semantic-aware networking-based framework for distributed wireless sensing. SANSee allows models constructed in one or a limited number of locations to be transferred to new locations without requiring any locally labeled data or model training. SANSee is built on the concept of physical-layer semantic-aware network (pSAN), which characterizes the semantic similarity and the correlations of sensed data across different locations. A pSAN-based zero-shot transfer learning solution is introduced to allow receivers in new locations to obtain location-specific models by directly aggregating the models trained by other receivers. We theoretically prove that models obtained by SANSee can approach the locally optimal models. Experimental results based on real-world datasets are used to verify that the accuracy of the transferred models obtained by SANSee matches that of the models trained by the locally labeled data based on supervised learning approaches.