A Survey of Commodity WiFi Sensing in 10 Years: Current Status, Challenges, and Opportunities

TL;DR

This survey reviews a decade of WiFi sensing technology using commodity devices, covering system evolution, key techniques, challenges, and future opportunities across activity recognition, object sensing, and localization.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of WiFi sensing developments, categorizes systems, highlights milestone works, and discusses future challenges and trends.

Findings

WiFi sensing systems have evolved significantly over the past decade.

Key techniques include activity recognition, object sensing, and localization.

Future opportunities involve addressing current challenges and expanding applications.

Abstract

The prevalence of WiFi devices and ubiquitous coverage of WiFi networks provide us the opportunity to extend WiFi capabilities beyond communication, particularly in sensing the physical environment. In this paper, we survey the evolution of WiFi sensing systems utilizing commodity devices over the past decade. It groups WiFi sensing systems into three main categories: activity recognition (large-scale and small-scale), object sensing, and localization. We highlight the milestone work in each category and the underline techniques they adopted. Next, this work presents the challenges faced by existing WiFi sensing systems. Lastly, we comprehensively discuss the future trending of commodity WiFi sensing.