Wi-Fi Radar: Recognizing Human Behavior with Commodity Wi-Fi

Abstract

Wi-Fi, which enables convenient wireless access to Internet services, has become integral to our modern lives. With widely-deployed Wi-Fi infrastructure, modern people can enjoy a variety of online services such as web browsing, online shopping, social interaction, and e-commerce almost at any time and any place. Traditionally, the most significant functionality of Wi-Fi is to enable high-throughput data communication between terminal devices and the Internet. However, beyond that, we observe that a novel type of system based on commodity Wi-Fi is increasingly attracting intense academic interest. Without hardware modification and redeployment, researchers are exploiting channel state information output by commodity Wi-Fi and transforming existing Wi-Fi systems into radar-like ones that can recognize human behavior along with data communication. This fancy functionality is tremendously expanding the boundaries of Wi-Fi to a new realm and triggering revolutionary applications in the context of the Internet of Things. In this article, we provide a guide to and introduce the impressive landscape of this new realm.