CSI-Based User Positioning, Channel Charting, and Device Classification with an NVIDIA 5G Testbed

TL;DR

This paper introduces real-world 5G CSI datasets from an NVIDIA testbed, enabling accurate neural user positioning, channel charting, and device classification, advancing practical sensing in cellular systems.

Contribution

It provides the first publicly available real-world 5G CSI datasets for sensing tasks, validated with high-accuracy results in positioning, charting, and device classification.

Findings

Neural UE positioning achieves 0.6cm indoor error.

Channel charting yields 73cm MAE outdoor.

Device classification accuracy is 99% same day.

Abstract

Channel-state information (CSI)-based sensing will play a key role in future cellular systems. However, no CSI dataset has been published from a real-world 5G NR system that facilitates the development and validation of suitable sensing algorithms. To close this gap, we publish three real-world wideband multi-antenna multi-open RAN radio unit (O-RU) CSI datasets from the 5G NR uplink channel: an indoor lab/office room dataset, an outdoor campus courtyard dataset, and a device classification dataset with six commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) user equipments (UEs). These datasets have been recorded using a software-defined 5G NR testbed based on NVIDIA Aerial RAN CoLab Over-the-Air (ARC-OTA) with COTS hardware, which we have deployed at ETH Zurich. We demonstrate the utility of these datasets for three CSI-based sensing tasks: neural UE positioning, channel charting in real-world coordinates, and closed-set device classification. For all these tasks, our results show high accuracy: neural UE positioning achieves 0.6cm (indoor) and 5.7cm (outdoor) mean absolute error, channel charting in real-world coordinates achieves 73cm mean absolute error (outdoor), and device classification achieves 99% (same day) and 95% (next day) accuracy. The CSI datasets, ground-truth UE position labels, CSI features, and simulation code are publicly available at https://caez.ethz.ch