Your AP knows how you move: fine-grained device motion recognition through WiFi

Abstract

Recent WiFi standards use Channel State Information (CSI) feedback for better MIMO and rate adaptation. CSI provides detailed information about current channel conditions for different subcarriers and spatial streams. In this paper, we show that CSI feedback from a client to the AP can be used to recognize different fine-grained motions of the client. We find that CSI can not only identify if the client is in motion or not, but also classify different types of motions. To this end, we propose APsense, a framework that uses CSI to estimate the sensor patterns of the client. It is observed that client's sensor (e.g. accelerometer) values are correlated to CSI values available at the AP. We show that using simple machine learning classifiers, APsense can classify different motions with accuracy as high as 90%.