Description
The Intel WiFi Link 5300 is the canonical 802.11n MIMO NIC used to bootstrap Channel State Information (CSI) research after Halperin et al. released their patched firmware and iwlwifi driver in 2011. It was the first commodity card that exposed per-subcarrier complex CSI in user space, and the Linux 802.11n CSI Tool defined the file format (.dat traces) most early CSI papers in the thesis bibliography use. The platform is now obsolete (no 802.11ac/ax) but remains the de facto reference NIC against which newer CSI extractors are benchmarked.
Specs / capabilities
- 802.11n (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz), 3x3 MIMO, up to 450 Mbps PHY
- Reports CSI for 30 subcarriers per spatial stream (subset of the 56 OFDM subcarriers, decimated by the firmware)
- 8-bit signed real / 8-bit signed imaginary per subcarrier per (Tx, Rx) antenna pair
- Mini PCIe form factor, requires patched
iwlwifiandconnectorkernel modules - Reports RSSI, AGC, noise floor, and per-antenna gain alongside CSI
Tooling
- Linux 802.11n CSI Tool (Halperin, Hu, Sheth, Wetherall — University of Washington, 2011): https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/
- MATLAB
read_bf_file.mparser shipped with the tool - Python ports:
csiread,csikit,Linux-80211n-CSITool-supplementary - Most early CSI activity-recognition / localization datasets (SignFi, Widar, FallDeFi) collected with this NIC
Used by (papers)
- halperin2011 — original Linux 802.11n CSI Tool release; defines the NIC's role
- Most commodity-WiFi CSI papers in the bibliography prior to ~2018 use this NIC as ground-truth platform