Wi-Fi Sensing: An Evolution in Wireless Technology

The next big technology evolution in Wireless Technologies is Wi-Fi Sensing. It is not just Wi-Fi, which provides access to the internet, but it keeps the sense of everything around us by enabling motion detection, gesture recognition, etc. providing new applications for healthcare, security, electronic devices - ease of use, and many more. Recently, last month– Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) came up with guidelines to deploy this technology and IEEE is already working on adding the technology to the new standards which are in development. IEEE has created an 802.11bf Task Group for Wi-Fi Sensing which is part of IEEE 802.11. The standard is set to release in 2024.

Wi-Fi Sensing extracts the information from Wi-Fi signals to sense the surrounding environment. It is possible with any Wi-Fi device and can be integrated with existing devices. Wi-Fi Sensing uses radio information to estimate the wireless channel and environment. The biggest advantage with based Wi-Fi Sensing is, that it does all the things that we were earlier doing using a Camera, Wi-Fi Sensing provides users complete privacy.

A device should have at least a Wi-Fi Transmitter and Wi-Fi Receiver. Wi-Fi Transmitter is also known as an “illuminator” that transmits the signal to extract information. There are two modes for Wi-Fi Sensing – Passive and Active. Passive is extracting information from the regular Wi-Fi communications while Active is triggering the device to transmit a signal for Wi-Fi sense.

The below provides a high-level overview of how the Wi-Fi Sensing system work. There are 3 components in Wi-Fi Sensing -

Wi-Fi Sensing System Diagram

  1. Radio  - IEEE 802.11 Standard. Connects the APIs and interfaces to higher layers

  2. Wi-Fi Sensing Software Agent – Signal Processing Algorithms to analyze and interpret the Wi-Fi environment & convert it into context-aware information

  3. Application Layer – Based on Wi-Fi Sensing output, provides features/services to the user

The current technological development focuses on developing a robust and intelligent Wi-Fi Sensing agent that processes and analyzes the channel measurement information and makes sensing decisions, such as detecting motions or gestures. This information is then shared with the application layer via the Wi-Fi Sensing agent I/O interface

 Wi-Fi sensing can be active or passive. An active system sends a Wi-Fi packet dedicated to sensing purposes. Conversely, a passive Wi-Fi sensing system appends Wi-Fi sensing data to existing Wi-Fi traffic.

Companies such as Origin Wireless AI, and Cognitive Systems Corp are a few names that are taking initial steps in this new era of context-aware Wi-Fi.    

Author

Chirayu Parashar

Senior Associate at Lumenci

He comes with expertise in Telecom, Networking, and Wireless Standards such as ETSI, IEEE, RFCs, etc. He has hands-on experience in conducting and designing test bench for various Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Further, he has contributed to an Industry-wide research report on Wireless Charging.

Lumenci Team