Calibrating time-variant, device-specific phase noise for COTS WiFi devices

Abstract

Current COTS WiFi based work on wireless motion sensing extracts human movements such as keystroking and hand motion mainly from amplitude training to classify different types of motions, as obtaining meaningful phase values is very challenging due to time-varying phase noises occurred with the movement. However, the methods based only on amplitude training are not very practical since their accuracy is not environment and location independent. This paper proposes an effective phase noise calibration technique which can be broadly applicable to COTS WiFi based motion sensing. We leverage the fact that multi-path for indoor environment contains certain static paths, such as reflections from wall or static furniture, as well as dynamic paths due to human hand and arm movements. When a hand moves, the phase value of the signal from the hand rotates as the path length changes and causes the superposition of signals over static and dynamic paths in antenna and frequency domain. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed technique, we experiment with a prototype system that can track hand gestures in a non-intrusive manner, i.e. users are not equipped with any device, using COTS WiFi devices. Our evaluation shows that calibrated phase values provide much rich, yet robust information on motion tracking – 80th percentile angle estimation error up to 14 degrees, 80th percentile tracking error up to 15 cm, and its robustness to the environment and the speed of movement.