Device heterogeneity refers to the variability in hardware characteristics across different WiFi transmitters and receivers — including differences in antenna configurations, radio frequency chains, chipset implementations, sampling rates, and proprietary signal processing pipelines — that cause the same physical phenomenon to produce distinct CSI or RSS measurements depending on which devices are used. This variability matters critically for WiFi sensing because models trained on data collected from one device or device pair often fail to generalize when deployed on different hardware, fundamentally limiting the real-world scalability and portability of sensing systems. Key variants of the problem include transmitter-side heterogeneity (e.g., differing transmission power or antenna patterns), receiver-side heterogeneity (e.g., different NIC drivers applying vendor-specific phase or amplitude corrections), and cross-pair heterogeneity, where the combined transmitter-receiver pairing introduces compounded signal distortions that are difficult to characterize or compensate for without device-specific calibration.
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